They Also Serve

Rating:
Summary: Good space action.
Review: Colonel Ray Longknife is a desk jockey. Shrapnel earned in battle has made him unfit for anything else. But now he's married and about to be a father. The last thing he needs is for his spaceship to go awry and get sent thousands of light-years off course into an unknown sector of the universe. But once there, a stunning discovery is made. They've found the ship that disappeared three-hundred-years ago on an earth like planet, building a world of their own. Joy soon turns to suspicion, though, as they begin to realize that there is a very sinister underbelly to the seemingly peaceful life of the planet dwellers. Mike Moscoe writes great space action and adventure. His ability to pull the reader into his universe is matched by his talent for creating believable science fiction.

Rating:
Summary: Good space action.
Review: Colonel Ray Longknife is a desk jockey. Shrapnel earned in battle has made him unfit for anything else. But now he's married and about to be a father. The last thing he needs is for his spaceship to go awry and get sent thousands of light-years off course into an unknown sector of the universe. But once there, a stunning discovery is made. They've found the ship that disappeared three-hundred-years ago on an earth like planet, building a world of their own. Joy soon turns to suspicion, though, as they begin to realize that there is a very sinister underbelly to the seemingly peaceful life of the planet dwellers. Mike Moscoe writes great space action and adventure. His ability to pull the reader into his universe is matched by his talent for creating believable science fiction.

Rating:
Summary: Harmless, Generally Speaking
Review: I picked this one up because I needed commute reading. Over-all, it's unobjectionable, a fast read. It's not memorable and if you've read as much SF as I have, it was predictable. So what? It did its job, and the story was fun.

There were a couple things I thought could have been better. We have a lost colony plunked down on a "teaching" world that can't seem to make contact with the colonists. I don't find that convincing on its face, but I let it ride. I object more seriously to the ending, which I won't give away, though you can probably guess it. Moscoe ducked the serious issue of co-existence with true machine intelligence. That, by the way, is fair enough. If what you want to write is entertainment, then you don't need to get into the whole messy issue of what sentience is, and how do you deal with the other.

Moscoe comes down on the "Can't we all just get along?" end of the spectrum. The main characters started out on different sides and finished close friends. No one is a goody-two-shoes, but when a character is portrayed as a seriously bad person, the driving force behind that personality (utter selfishness) is well potrayed and consistent. There are the usual clueless civilians, which I found tiresome, but hey. Most military types view civilians as easiest to protect by ensuring they never get close to the action.

There was a fault of diction that drove me bats. Moscoe, at least twice, uses "disburse" for "disperse." Anyone who doesn't understand the different roots of these two words should see me after class...well, no. Let me explain. Disperse comes from the Latin "dispersus", which comes from particle dis + spargere "to strew." Thus, English disperse, meaning "to scatter" in its briefest definition. Got that?

Disburse comes from Old French, composed of the Latin particle dis + Old French bourse, which means purse in the sense of "where you keep your money." So we arrive at English "disburse", meaning "to pay out."

They are nowhere near being the same word, and it made me squawk. May a decently educated reader ask who is proof-reading this stuff? There was other stuff, but the disburse for disperse was egregious!

Anyway, as I said, harmless. Read it in paper, and then sell it.

Rating:
Summary: Fantasy Masquerading as SF
Review: Moscoe returns to the Society of Humanity universe, and brings back the characters introduced in two earlier books. Then he has them lose their way in space and end up on a mysterious planet on the other side of the galaxy. A planet that just happens to be inhabited by humans from another lost ship, and happens to be home to supercomputer network that can do anything it wants, if it can just get its act together long enough.

While the individual characters are moderately interesting, the plot is completely pointless and arbitrary. Rules change as things go along, and the story really resembles a poorly developed Sword & Sorcery plot as much as anything else.

Rating:
Summary: A sci-fi version of "Through The Looking Glass"
Review: The war is over with the Unity Party defeated. Ray Longknife, part of the winning team, killed the unity Party's President. As a reward for his bravery, Ray is now Wardhaven's Minister of Science and Technology. In a further ironic twist, Ray married the woman who crippled him during the war. They expect their first child soon.

On a routine diplomatic mission, Ray's spaceship is sabotaged and he and the crew end up leaping into an uncharted galaxy. They land on the nearest habitable planet, which the inhabitants of the lost Santa Maria spaceship have colonized. When the spacers land, they upset the social dynamics leading to strange happenings. They learn that the colonists shared a planet for over three hundred years with an unknown being, who can change the molecular structure of their brains. When warfare seems imminent, Ray and his soldiers implement a battle plan that will either destroy the planet or return it to humanity.

THEY ALSO SERVE is populated with characters that seem to live in any neighborhood, which makes it easy to care what happens to the cast as they move from one trauma to another crisis. The fast-paced story line is filled with action, but author Mike Moscoe changes the pace occasionally with thought-provoking concept that impels the reader to reflect for a moment. Mr. Moscoe provides the audience with a powerful military science fiction.

Harriet Klausner

Rating:
Summary: A Good Read
Review: They Also Serve is the third book in this series about military veteran trying to build a better life, The Price of Peace and First Casualty preceded it. It is an engaging story and I enjoyed reading it.

Former Army Colonel Ray Longknife and former Marine Captain Mary Rodrigo plus crew take a bad space jump and end up marooned halfway across the galaxy from home. They discover a planet inhabited by the descendants of a lost ship, the Santa Maria. The Santa Maria was lost 300 years prior in the first recorded jump point mishap. The planet turns out to be a long unused teaching machine created by the same three races that built the jump points. A million years of inactivity have driven the teaching machine insane. Ray and Mary must defeat this machine, a computer who's hardware is a planet, if they are going to save themselves, their crew, and their new friends.

Rating:
Summary: A Good Read
Review: They Also Serve is the third book in this series about military veteran trying to build a better life, The Price of Peace and First Casualty preceded it. It is an engaging story and I enjoyed reading it.

Former Army Colonel Ray Longknife and former Marine Captain Mary Rodrigo plus crew take a bad space jump and end up marooned halfway across the galaxy from home. They discover a planet inhabited by the descendants of a lost ship, the Santa Maria. The Santa Maria was lost 300 years prior in the first recorded jump point mishap. The planet turns out to be a long unused teaching machine created by the same three races that built the jump points. A million years of inactivity have driven the teaching machine insane. Ray and Mary must defeat this machine, a computer who's hardware is a planet, if they are going to save themselves, their crew, and their new friends.