#kris longknife

[callthedetective]

Bo-bo-book haul! 🕵️‍♂️🥳

Hit my favorite used bookstore for the first time in a long time and was not disappointed. I might have gone a bit overboard with the mysteries and thrillers. 😅

Finding the Ruth Rendell made my day because Sins of the Father (pubbed in the UK as A New Lease of Death) is insanely hard to find: from what I can tell, only Amazon had it and they wanted $14 for a brand new copy. I liked From Doon with Death and want to continue reading the Inspector Wexford series, but I don't like it enough to spend that much on a copy.

I bought Murder on Bamboo Lane because the main character is a bicycle cop and that's a novelty that I can get behind. 🚴‍♀️👮‍♀️

[laserswordsanddragons]

Not sure what to take from her computer’s approval, Kris stepped from her room and closed the door. As she turned, the lights came up in the living room; Jack sat on the couch, legs crossed, face grim. Silent,he pointed her to a place on the couch.

-- From Kris Longknife: Deserter by Mike Shepherd.

I busted out laughing when I read this because it is so fucking extra. Jack was just sitting there in the dark for g-d knows how long just so he could be dramatic. 😂

[fuckyeah-nerdery]

Current reads. Mutineer and Vanished are my two primary books right now, with the other three in the queue after I finish them. Leviathan Wakes is a re-read and I’m taking my time with it.

[writinginobscurity]

Obscure #NonSpoilerReviews “Mutineer”

“Mutineer″ by Mike Shepherd (Part One)

Get your space boots on cadet, for this week’s review, we’re blasting off with Mike Shepherd’s military sci-fi novel “Mutineer,” which is the first book in the Kris Longknife series.

What I love about this book:

“Mutineer” features a strong female protagonist that never stoops into the strong super serious badass woman warrior cliché or frilly girly-girl cliché who needs to be saved by her boyfriend. Kris manages to be a strong, capable character who doesn’t sacrifice her femininity or sense of humor.

With quite a few plates spinning, which the novel pulls off reasonably well, there are bits for many different audiences—action-adventure, political intrigue, military sci-fi, and even the suggestion of an unexpected romance subplot in this story. It’s certainly never slow-paced.

This novel’s liquid metal starships that can shift into different forms and configurations as needed is a cool science fiction technology that I haven’t seen used before in quite this way. For me, liquid metal shapeshifters have always been terminators. So I thought it was pretty neat how the Typhoon is described as a ship that can morph into various forms to suit its mission parameters or, while in battle, to compensate for damage.

Want more? Get my full review here:

https://www.writinginobscurity.com/2020/12/mutineer-by-mike-shepherd-fiction-review.html

[fuckyeah-nerdery]

Hey, you guys want to hear about what has to be one of worst fictional governments ever?

It’s in Kris Longknife: Mutineer by Mike Shepherd and boy is it a real doozy. There’s a part of the book where Kris (an ensign in the Navy, btw) gets deployed to a planet called Olympia, which has been devastated after a volcano and the island it was on is believed to have blown up. This and some other problems cause miserable conditions, such as near constant rain and acid rain at that.

Anyway, she goes there to take part in the humanitarian mission on the planet and ends up fighting it out with a large group of bandits. So afterward, she’s talking to her CO and tells him that she wants to put all of the spacers and marines under her command up for combat medals.

Which her CO, Colonel Hancock denies. They’ll get the standard medal given out for humanitarian missions, but no combat ones. He explains that the only way for any of them to be eligible for those is if the bandits were declared rebels and they can’t because there’s no government for them to rebel against.

And this is where shit gets wild. The colony was founded by what I can only guess to be hardline libertarians or something. Literally, the first sentence in the colony’s constitution says “They who govern best, govern least”. The government itself consists only of a legislature that meets for six weeks...every three years. The last time they met was just before the disaster and whoever wrote their constitution didn’t think to add a clause something to allow emergency sessions. As Hancock points out, there’s still a year and a half to go before the government can convene again and the only way to speed it up would be to hold fresh elections, which isn’t an option given the current condition of the colony. Hell, the only reason there’s even a humanitarian mission to begin with is because a colonist had political connections to Kris’s homeworld’s government and had them sponsor the mission.

I know there are worse and dumber governments in fiction, but good grief, that takes the cake.

[laserswordsanddragons]

Currently reading for a second time. Not a bad military SF novel. Kris Longknife is the daughter of the PM of her home planet and the great-granddaughter of two legendary military heroes (who are still alive and well, which is wild to me), who joins the Society of Humanity Navy to build her own life separate from her family’s.

The book starts off pretty strong with Ensign Longknife leading a mission to rescue a little girl (the daughter of a planetary leader) from her kidnappers. From there, she’s decorated and then sent to a colony world devastated by natural disaster and uncovers a conspiracy to spark an interstellar war between members of the Society of Humanity, the human “empire”/political entity.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff in this book, like how naval ships are made out of this stuff called smart metal which allows the ships to change their size and shape based on the situation. So like when a ship isn’t in a combat situation, the crew can stretch the hull out so that almost everybody has their own quarters, but when they’re about to get into a fight, they can make the ship smaller so that the hull is thicker. Kris’s job on her ship is to manipulate the smart metal so compensate for any battle damage and to fix any problems when the ship transforms in non-combat situations.

And man, that planet she gets sent to! Basically, an island on the opposite side of the colony blows up and blankets the atmosphere in ash and debris. At the same time, something funky happens to the ocean currents and so it’s also raining almost continuously. Agriculture has failed, famine is widespread, and civil authority is in the process of collapsing by the time she gets there. Also turns out the military is using the planet as a dumping ground for undesirable officers and personnel. The head officer is a colonel who was blamed for a massacre on another planet but is innocent. Basically, think “The Butcher of Anderson Station” and “The Butcher of Komarr”.

[mistressofreads-blog]

Kris Longknife's Successor - April Wrap Up 2018

[fiannawolf]

Dives into another 12 book series.

*Arms self with torpedoes*

Hello Kris Longknife....Honor Harrington has prepared me for uber book levels of crack.