Cliches! In! Space!

Starship: Mutiny by Mike Resnick

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I really wanted to like this better. I love a good space opera, and Mike Resnick writes good stories, but for me, this was a mess. The characters were one-dimensional. The aliens were humans in rubber suits. The plot was utterly contrived and cliched.

Take the hero, Commander Cole Wilson. He's the most decorated officer in the fleet, but has also been removed from command twice and busted in rank because he's smarter than everyone else and ignores orders he doesn't agree with. Once assigned to the Theodore Roosevelt as Second Officer, he isn't an hour into his first bridge watch before he's ordering the ship to divert from its patrol, recklessly taking on an alien force literally single-handed, and coming out of it not facing a court-martial, but rather with another medal.

Oh, and every female on the ship wants to sleep with him.

I wish I could say it gets better, but it doesn't. Contrived situations follow that force a climax that's resolved by a deus ex machina of the first order. I won't be bothering with the rest of this series.



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