SF/F Review: Caine's Mutiny (Caine Riordan #4) by Charles Gannon https://t.co/kvKcXzXilm Short Review: 5.5 out of 10 (1/3)— garik16 (@garik16) March 2, 2018
Short Review (cont): Caine's Mutiny continues the story of Caine Riordan as he's forced to journey to another hostile alien race's planet to extract mysteriously present human soldiers and to prevent a new war. More MilSci than prior books, and far less interesting. (2/3)— garik16 (@garik16) March 2, 2018
Caine's Mutiny is the fourth in the Caine Riordan (also known as the Terran Republic series) series by Charles Gannon. I'd read the first three books - Fire with Fire, Trial by Fire, Raising Caine - about a year and a half ago, early in the period when I began to read SFF books again. Those first three books came to my attention as they were each Nebula Nominated, and the first in the series, Fire with Fire, is available in ebook format for free. The series follows Polymath Caine Riordan, an intelligence analyst who gets drafted into handling First Contact between humanity and multiple other alien races, as he attempts to use his intellect in diplomacy, espionage, and military leadership to prevent humanity and the Earth from the dangers posed by possibly friendly and possibly hostile alien races.
At the time I read the books, I enjoyed Books 1 and 3, but didn't love book 2, which was much more MilSci than the other two books (which were more like SF First Contact/Adventure books). I skimmed through the first three books as I listened to Caine's Mutiny as an audiobook, and well....my opinions have dropped quite a bit of those books now that I have a better field of comparison (Book 2's treatment of its two most primary female characters is just.....ugh). Caine's Mutiny is better than Book 2, but it's well behind Books 1 and 3, alas.
More after the jump (spoilers for Books 1-3 are inevitable sorry):
------------------------------------------------Plot Summary--------------------------------------------
After the end of Raising Caine, Caine Riordan and his team find their ship on board the Slaasrithi vessel that carried them last book on their way to a Hkh'Rkh colony planet, where a distress call has suggested that mystery humans are attacking the planet. That's a bit confusing, given that the planet is well beyond humanity's technological ability for space travel, and it's clear that some third part is involved. But if they don't discover what's happening and take care of it, it's possible the Hkh'Rkh will re-ignite the war against humanity, which it can ill afford at this time. The only Hkh'Rkh arguing humanity's innocence on the planet is their former advocate Yaargraukh, but he is hamstrung by a weak political position.
When the team gets to the planet, however, they find a battalion of lost soldiers from the 20th century, displaced across time and space and dropped onto the planet with a set of weaponry but no way to communicate with the non-human locals. In order to save these innocent humans, Caine will be forced to work his greatest miracle yet - and even then, he might be forced into a battle with incredibly bad odds. And then there's the presence of the evil K'tor, who are hanging out in the sector, ready to intercede for their own purposes.....
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Like Book 2 in this series, Caine's Mutiny is very much a MilSci novel, maybe even the most of any such book in the series. About a third of the book is a single military conflict (I'm not kidding, it takes up like 10 hours on the audiobook). And I'm not a huge fan of MilSci, so I wasn't in love with that.
Still it's fun at times to have Gannon spinning the story in places where Caine has to try and outwit his opponents, although Caine tends to overexplain things in this book constantly, even where there isn't any intellect or wit being displayed. The problem with the book is that for the most part, none of the other characters involved in the story have any depth, leaving the entire thing on Caine's shoulders (you could replace pretty much near anyone else with generic soldiers and have little change) . And, even if I greatly enjoyed MilSci, putting Caine simply as a MilSci commander makes him even more one dimensional than usual and just makes it kind of boring.
Honestly, this book extends book 3's problem of making the mysterious series antagonists, the K'tor, just become incredibly boring and blah. Their actions in this one could not be more generically evil if they tried (literal Nazis are involved, I'm not even kidding), and it hurts what was once an interesting mysterious villain.
You'll note I didn't mention at all in the summary any hint of the "Mutiny" in the book's title - that's because the only mutiny involved occurs literally in the last 3 chapters of a 74 chapter book. That's pretty awful for something that's key in the book's title and the Amazon summary, as it just made me wonder throughout for when the Mutiny was actually going to happen, and then in the end it happens in an incredibly boring and rote way.
This book isn't terrible - again if you like MilSci, you'll probably enjoy this at least a little bit. But this will be the last in the series I read even if Gannon publishes a fifth book, which is a shame because even after a reread, the setup from the first book was promising (though again the second book is awful).
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