Terminal Uprising, available Feb 12th from all fine booksellers
TLDR; Must Read, well worth it at thrice the price.
What would you do if you awoke from a coma in a hospital, and the Doctors’ had told you that you made yourself go insane before, and had mindlessly killed someone? What if the Doctors found you and took you in, fixed your mind, trained you, made you tougher, and gave you a job?
Would you feel guilty? Thankful?
What would you do if you found out
(SPOILER FOR THE FIRST BOOK, TERMINAL ALLIANCE)
that in fact it was the Doctors themselves who made you this way, and that you didn’t ruin your own life, but that they did?
Jim C Hines’s protagonist, Marion ‘Mops’ Adamopoulos, (who spent twelve years gratefully working in a spaceship; not as a fighter pilot nor a dashing space captain, but as a janitor,) learns that her species’ alien saviors were actually the ones that had caused Humanity to become mindlessly feral and terrifying. This upsets her, because the aliens had remade much of humanity into their grateful foot soldiers. For years much of humanity was nothing more than enlisted grunts rebuilt to kill, die and serve.
When something terrible happens that makes a portion of the human crew go feral ‘Mops’ is left in command, but other things happen and things go from worse to really bad. With little to no experience amongst her ragtag survivors, she is thrust into the role of rogue captain of an lawless alien ship.
Her former saviors can’t let the galaxy know what really happened to Humanity, so they are very eager to silence the entire crew to keep the universe unaware.
Well, I hate to say it but…
Mops fails, and her whole crew dies and the second book is about her life as a ghost in space…
…just kidding. But let me say this, in Book 1, the characters are well developed and thoroughly fleshed out, and people you root for. The ending is innovative, and a fine ending to the premise, but Book II Terminal UPRISING takes that premise and runs out the door with it. It includes action packed scenes, but also a shocking new secret, and characters that you can fall in love with all over again.
Mops and her crew face a new challenge with new enemies and new allies, as Adamopoulos is forced to come up with inventive solutions to combat and logistical problems she was never trained for, to guard humanity’s greatest treasures from absolute destruction.
And several of her solutions are hilarious. This is not a grim dark struggle, but Terminal Uprising has some good up and downs, and I was constantly surprised by funny scenes.
(All I will say about this is look out for the ‘space whales.’)
In closing I just want to say that this book is better than the first, and if you liked Alliance, Uprising is an absolute must read. If you’re new, go pick up Book 1 AND 2 so that you don’t miss a beat of this smart, hilarious thrill ride. I cannot wait for book 3!