‘Starship: Rebel’ – Mike Resnick (Pyr Books)

If you give me a science fiction novel that’s full of talk of ‘LaGrange points’, the effects of travelling at relativistic speeds and other highbrow concepts (to me anyway) I’ll give it a go, quite happily, but half of it will go straight over my head. I’ll spend that time waiting for the story to start.
Give me a science fiction novel where proper science gets a brief mention but is then pushed to one side in favour of aliens with weird names, space battles, galactic heroes and conversations via ‘sub-space radio’…? I’m in my element!
My name is Graeme and I’m a Space Opera fan…
Mike Resnick’s latest instalment, in the ‘Starship’ series falls firmly into the Space Opera camp (with a side helping of Military sci-fi) and I loved it…

Following the events of ‘Starship: Mercenary’, Captain Wilson Cole (with his ship the ‘Theodore Roosevelt’) now heads up the largest military force on the Inner Frontier. His collection of ships has actually grown so large now that he is beginning to find that prospective clients can no longer afford his mercenary services and some hard decisions are looming on the horizon…
Before Cole has to confront these decisions however, tragedy strikes and he finds that his focus has now shifted. Where he used to avoid the Republic (who has a price on his head) Wilson now finds himself declaring war on them. His fleet is outnumbered and outgunned by a Republic Fleet that is millions strong, not odds that Cole would choose but odds that he is happy to take on…

‘Starship: Rebel’ is unashamed space opera at its most entertaining. Right from the very beginning the reader is thrust into inter-planetary warfare and the machinations of the alien inhabitants of Singapore Station who are constantly scheming ways to make a quick buck. It helps if you’ve already read the preceding book in the series (‘Starship: Mercenary’) but Resnick layers his text with enough explanatory passages so that the first time reader should have little trouble getting into the story very quickly. This approach is a good thing as the pace of the tale shoots along like one of Resnick’s starships. There is always something happening, even in the quieter moments, and the stakes are high the whole way through. The climatic battle is epic in scale and Resnick takes a novel approach in describing some of its later stages. I’d never really stopped to consider what happened to all the wreckage in such a battle but Resnick obviously has with his depiction of a battle in space that descends into a war of attrition amidst floating piles of scrap.

Sometimes though, it felt like the pace of the novel was covering up deficiencies in the plot itself and, in this respect, ‘Starship: Rebel’ falls foul of the conventions it follows as an example of ‘pulp space opera’. While the journey is entertaining enough, I was never in any doubt that Wilson Cole and his crew would win through at the end of the day. They are obviously ‘good’ while the Republic that they are fighting is obviously ‘bad’ and we all know who will win a ‘pulp battle’ between good and evil... This meant that certain confrontations and ‘set piece moments’ became nothing more than vehicles to showcase Wilson’s heroism and did little else to add to the plot itself. To be fair, the payoff is that Resnick spends plenty of time fleshing out Cole’s character but the demands that the plot places upon Cole sees him depicted as a typical ‘square jawed heroic starship captain out for justice in a lawless galaxy’. This fits in well with ‘Starship: Rebel’s’ pulp roots but it would have been nice if Resnick had been able to get under Cole’s skin in other ways as well...

Despite these issues, if you accept ‘Starship: Rebel’ for what it is (fast paced and entertaining, but a light read...) then I think you’ll have just as much fun with it as I did. I’m looking forward to seeing where this series goes next.

Eight out of Ten.