Rating: 
Summary: Start of a neverending story...
Review: Watch out monkey boys! This is the first book of a still growing series. Short stories, many of them linked by events or characters, showing the Man-Kzin Wars, how they started and who won them. A lot of the stories also deal with the Kzin alone, as many of the later stories DO show how the Kzin became a space-traveling race of warriors. Many of the shorts have been collected into full novels. Get the whole series. Some stories you can't help but read again and again, yet a few I can't re-read because I feel pity or even pain at some of the endings. Remember, the stories are about war and some of the author's hold nothing back, with very realistic plots and battle scenes.
Rating: 
Summary: Worth a look for two good stories.
Review: __________________________________________
This addition to the long-running Man-Kzin sharecrop series is
worth your attention for two stories: Niven's Own "Fly-by-Night", which
is pretty good, but had an uncredited earlier appearance in (IB)
Asimov's. And newish author Paul Chafe, whose "Windows of the Soul" is
the best of the book, and the one that makes MK-IX worth looking for,
even if you've already seen the Niven. "Windows" starts out as an ARM
police-procedural on Tiamat station, after the brutal murder and
dismemberment of Miranda Holtzman, a 19 year-old student engineer. ARM
Captain Joel Allson develops a hot romance during the investigation --
which veers off into a disturbing political-terrorist operation, and
finishes with a truly nasty twist. Nice. Chafe's had a couple of
previous (unmemorable) appearances (in MK-VII & VIII). The other two stories are a Poul Anderson novella ("Pele"), set aside
after a slow, dull start, and "His Sergeant's Honor" by Hal Colebatch,
which reads like a novel outline. For a bad, dull novel: "As you know,
Raargh-Sergeant, we Wunderkzin..." Did I mention the Lurid Baen Cover...? It's Howling Time! Conclusion: one of the weaker of the Man-Kzin books, but the Chafe is
first-rate entertainment.
| 
