Fred Patten Reviews The Heart of Valor

The Heart of Valor

Author: Tanya Huff

Publisher: DAW Books

ISBN 10: 0-7564-0435-5

ISBN 13: 978-0-7564-0435-2

This third novel in Huff’s Confederation military s-f series can be read on its own, but it is a direct sequel to the second novel. DAW Books has just published A Confederation of Valor, a combined edition of the first two novels, Valor’s Choice and The Better Part of Valor, which is recommended.

Torin Kerr is a sergeant in the Confederation Marines, in a multi-species interstellar civilization. Earth and its humans have been recruited into this civilization by its founders, dubbed the Elder Races, to help fight in a galactic war against the savage Others. Most of the actual fighting is done by the Marines, which consist of the three most warlike species discovered by the Elder Races; the humans, the di’Taykan, and the Krai. In the previous novels, Kerr was part of a detachment of Marines involved with bringing the newly discovered reptilian Silsviss into the Confederation, and exploring a totally alien spaceship, Big Yellow. Both were full of deathtraps and heavy on futuristic military action.

As The Heart of Valor opens, Torin has been promoted from Staff Sergeant to Gunnery Sergeant and assigned to give briefings on the Silsviss at the Confederation’s Ventris space station. (Big Yellow is still classified Top Secret.) After several weeks of repetitious briefings, Torin is bored stiff, so she jumps at the chance to take charge of a platoon of 32 recruits to the Marines’ training planet Crucible for a rugged winter combat simulation testing. They have hardly begun before they are cut off from off-planet communication and the automated tanks, aerial drones, and other military equipment that is supposed to give them a grueling but non-lethal testing starts trying to kill them for real. The novel is mostly hard-boiled military action as Torin tries to keep her recruits, with the biological needs of three different species, alive long enough to turn them into a smoothly-operating platoon of real Marines; and find out who has reprogrammed the simulation to kill them all.

The Confederation novels have been compared favorably to the Starship Troopers movie and video game, and Sgt. Torin Kerr to Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in the Aliens movies. There are additional colorful aliens such as the obnoxious interstellar news reporter Presit a Tur durValintrisy, a small furry Katrien who looks vaguely like an otter with frighteningly sharp teeth, chromed claws and tinted sunglasses, who is trying to investigate from offworld who or what is sabotaging Crucible. The Heart of Valor is top-notch suspenseful military science fiction.

Fred Patten Reviews Command Decision

Command Decision
Author: Elizabeth Moon
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine Books
ISBN 10: 0-345-49159-9
ISBN 13: 978-0-345-49159-6

This is the fourth annual novel in Moon’s “Vatta’s War” series, following Trading in Danger, Marque and Reprisal, and Engaging the Enemy. I have been enjoying this series, so I eagerly dove into Command Decision, and I was not disappointed. Yet it begins in mid-story. Mysteriously disgraced Rafe Dunbarger, son of the CEO of ISC (InterStellar Communications), lands on the planet Cascadia in disguise, seeking to learn what has happened to his family; while harried Stella Vatta on an orbiting space station begins rebuilding Vatta Transport, the family’s sabotaged interstellar shipping fleet. Kylara Vatta, the main protagonist who is trying to make three tiny merchant spaceships into the nucleus of an anti-pirate military space fleet, does not appear until chapter three. “Vatta’s War” is a wonderfully exciting, fast-paced galaxy-spanning adventure saga, but readers unfamiliar with it should definitely begin with Trading in Danger, the first novel.

“Vatta’s War” takes place in a galactic society bound together commercially by merchant spaceships, and technologically by “ansibles”, interstellar communication devices that are a monopoly of the powerful ISC. In the previous novels 21-year-old Kylara Vatta, a member of the family that owns one of the largest fleets of merchant spaceships, is unfairly expelled from her homeworld’s Spaceforce Academy. Her father creates a job for her by appointing her captain of an old freighter being flown to a wrecking yard; a ceremonial assignment that Ky tries to make more profitable by signing a contract to deliver cargo to a nearby planet en route. She gets caught in an interplanetary war, attacks by space pirates, a bloody mutiny, and more. While this is going on, the ansibles that provide interstellar communication suddenly go silent, and an unknown enemy kills most members of the Vatta family and destroys their spaceships. Ky, using the skills she learned as a military cadet, gradually finds herself leading a tiny group of armed freighters acting as privateers against the space pirates that take advantage of the breakdown in communication between the worlds.

Command Decision is full of suspense ranging from space battles and commando raids to corporate hostile takeovers. Moon, who served in the U.S. Marines, writes taut military action scenes. This series is in the tradition of the “Heinlein juveniles” that have introduced teens to s-f for over fifty years, with a quietly assured young woman commander who makes these novels good escape reading for girls as well as boys.