Hostile Takeover: Profiteer, Partisan, Revolutionary (Hostile Takeover)

Rating:
Summary: As good as any space soap gets
Review: So you're the brother. The good one. Only problem is your brother (the other one, the evil one) has it all: the power, the guns, the big, bulky, loaded space ships. And he has the law on his side. In short: you're an out-lawed, slightly irritated, pretty clever, sort of a pirate guy who knows he's much better than his brother. And this, my friend, makes you want to get out among people. To steal their money, take their weapons and go after your brother. Which is what you do. And the result? Aahhh... Well... Suffice to say it's worth it. And will good prevail in the end? This book was written at a time we still believed that... So, who knows?

Rating:
Summary: Pretty Darn Good
Review: This is the second book I've read by Swann (after the Moreau Omnibus), though both are actually complete trilogies. First, let me just get this out of the way - Daw has significantly cleaned up its editing errors on this book. The Moreau trilogy was so badly edited that it made an otherwise outstanding story jerky and second-rate. Hostile Takeover is far cleaner - thank you.

Okay, on to my take on the story. Set in the same universe as the Moreau books, Hostile Takeover tells the dissolution of the government that the Moreau books began to set up. The year is 2350, and all of human space (80+ worlds) is joined into one unwieldly Confederacy, which is starting to seriously fray around the edges as the various ethnic and political divisions start to diverge.

The planet Bakunin, established as a dumping ground for Earth undesirables, is now an anarchic 'pirate planet', where anything goes, and established Nation-States are anathema. Colonel Klaus Dacham is sent in to take over a local arms manufacturer as a prelude to a full-scale Confederacy invasion. The whys and wherefores of this action are the meat of the story, and very tasty meat it is...

The main character is Dominic Magnus, the exiled brother of Dacham, and also the CEO of the targeted arms manufacturer. His character is by far the most well-developed and sympathetic, but Swann does an outstanding job of taking us into the minds of even peripheral characters. The fates some of these characters meet is not at all what I expected, and is the reason I gave 4 instead of 5 stars. Granted, that's merely a personal opinion; the story itself deserves at least 5 stars.

The technologies, the byzantine political maneuverings, and the motivations for each character are so well thought-out that this universe really came alive for me, even more so than the Moreau trilogy.

I can only hope that Swann will someday write a sequel to this work, letting us know what became of Tetsami and Shane...