SciFi/Fantasy Advance Review: Terminal Uprising (Janitors of the Post-Apocalypse #2) by Jim C Hines: https://t.co/UeDuZbrXCt Short Review: 8 out of 10 (1/3)— garik16 (@garik16) December 28, 2018
Short Review (cont): The sequel to Terminal Alliance finds Mops and the crew of the EMCS Pufferfish - well the janitorial and hygiene staff now crewing her - returning to Earth to discover more about what happened to humanity & what's going on now. Still a pretty funny book (2/3)— garik16 (@garik16) December 28, 2018
Full Disclosure: This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher, Daw Books, in advance of the novel's release on February 12, 2019 in exchange for a potential review. I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way (if I'd not liked the book, I just would not have reviewed it).
In the end, Terminal Uprising is an enjoying second novel in the series, but felt a bit like a step back from its predecessor. Don't get me wrong, the book is still fun and I really enjoy the characters and their development in this novel, but this book is a little less filled with jokes (at least it felt that way to me) and the story is a bit more grounded - literally in fact. The result is still a solid novel that I can easily recommend to those who enjoyed Terminal Alliance, but it didn't quite take that step up I was hoping for.
Note: If you don't read Terminal Alliance before this book, you're going to be a bit confused and really miss out on who these characters are, so you really shouldn't start this series with this book. If you are the type to enjoy this type of story anyway, you'll enjoy Terminal Alliance, so there's no point of trying to skip ahead anyhow.
---------------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------
Marion "Mops" Adamopoulos and the crew of the EMCS Pufferfish were supposed to just be Hygiene and Sanitation workers - in other words, Janitors. Instead, the team - Mops, Wolf, Kumar, Monroe, and Grom, plus former bouncer Rubin and the hated Rokkau named Azure - are now fugitives from the Krakau Alliance, looking for clues to rescue Azure's people from their imprisonment and for ways to help humanity in general. This has generally involved flying from place to place, looking for clues, and trying not to get killed by using all their janitorial skills in the strangest ways possible.
But when Mops gets a lead from the sympathetic Admiral Pachelbel that another Krakau Admiral - Admiral Sage - is performing significant experiments on humans, the team is forced to go to the one planet they hoped to never go back to - Earth, now in shambles due to the Krakau plague that turned all of humanity into feral monsters.
But what the crew finds on Earth is nothing like what they expected and reveals even more truths that were kept from humans by the Krakau.....as well as the sinister plans of Admiral Sage, who will stop at nothing to try and stop the Alliance's enemies, the Prodryans. And after all this time, Sage has gotten wise to the crew's janitorial-based tactics, so the crew may find themselves in a situation on Earth they can't get out of.....
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Terminal Uprising is a rather fun book, thanks to its combination of some clever writing and some really fun and enjoyable characters. Each chapter begins with a snippet from a writing or from characters away from the main action that often provides a laugh, and then the main storyline frequently adds to that, with the crew's janitorial skills providing some.....unconventional ways of handling their dangerous circumstances.
Again, the characters are a big part of that. Mops makes a really fun main character, and the rest of the team is still particularly great. One character who gets a real shine to develop in this book is Wolf, who was (and still is) a punch-first, talk-later reckless as hell character in the first book but actually gets some pretty great development here - and still provides a lot of rather great comic relief. And then there's the book's new member of the team, Advocate of Violence (aka "Cate"), who is a murderous alien.....attorney, which speaks to this attorney's heart so damn much.
The plot is also particularly well done, with the crew continuing to find new ways to put their janitorial skills to great use, and the genre-savvy antagonist actually realizing that and trying to counter them by anticipation. Part of what the crew finds on Earth isn't that unpredictable for the reader - the reader can see part of it coming from its inception (at least I did) - but it all works well and ties together rather neatly. And the ending is done in a nice satisfying unconventional way, so that even though the book presents some sequel hooks, it never feels incomplete.
Still, I thought Terminal Uprising was a step down from Terminal Alliance for two reasons, both of which might be remedied next book. The first was that the story seemed to me to lose a little bit of its humor from the first book, which I described as being as rapid fire on the jokes as possible while still having a coherent plot, with more jokes working than not. By contrast, Terminal Uprising leans a bit more into the seriousness with the plot - the book is still definitely on the light side don't get me wrong (new character "Cate" as mentioned above is a joy in this regard), but the difference was not what I was hoping for.
The second drop off was that the book takes place pretty much entirely on Earth, whereas the first involved the crew adventuring to many systems, and the result is that the focus of the worldbuilding is actually narrowed, and a bit less interesting as a result. This change promises for sure to be remedied next book based upon the sequel hooks involved here.
Anyhow, if you want a lighter SF series, this series definitely still qualifies, and I look forward to the next book whenever it comes out.
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