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Title: The Empire's Corps
Series:
The Empire's Corps #1
Author: Christopher
Nuttal
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Genre:
SF
Pages: 505
Format: Digital Edition
Captain Stalker
leads a disastrous rescue attempt on a slum on Earth and ends up with
thousands of civilians dead. When he speaks “Truth to Power” (so
help me my eyes almost rolled out of my head at the bloody cliched
phrase) he and all 80+ of his marines are exiled to a planet on the
rim of the Empire, Avalon. He is given a huge budget by the Marine
Commander and very vague instructions.
The Empire is
tottering and the rim planets will soon be on their own. Marine
Commander hopes that Stalker and his marines can keep Avalon from
falling into barbarity.
Once on the planet,
Stalker is faced with the problems of an entrenched
political/economic elite who want to keep thing the way they are even
while that path is leading straight to revolution. Stalker deals with
the bandits, then deals with the Opposition forces and the Council
all in one fell swoop.
The book ends with
a Space Navy ship dropping off a note telling Avalon that the Empire
will be sending no more ships to them for the foreseeable future.
PG'sRambling has been reviewing this series on and off even
though he's more of a spaceship kind of guy while I prefer the ground
pounder action. And that is exactly what this book, and series I
assume, is all about: Space Marines during the decline of a galactic
empire.
Let's get the negatives out of the way first.
“Truth to Power”. For fracks sake, responsible people don't use
that hackneyed phrase, only people like the Occupy movement, ie,
those with too much time on their hands and no drive to actually
support themselves. Thankfully, it was only used 2-3 times but that
was just 2-3 times too much. Nuttal also writes about homosexuality
enough that I won't be surprised if I end up dnf'ing this series in
another book or two. Thankfully here it was not “PC homosexual
character spewing modern liberal cant, CHECKMARK”. He also writes
about brothel's and prostitution and they are both legal in this book
universe. One of the characters opines “It's ok as long as they
“want” to get into that business”. It never works that way and
always ends up as a legal sex slave trafficking. I was more concerned
about the attitude behind it than that it was included. There was
also one sex scene that was used as a plot device, so I can't accuse
it of being completely gratuitous, but another one like it in any
future books will push this out of bounds for me.
Now on to what I did like.
80 highly trained marines on a backwoods world. Nuttal makes as much
hay with this as he can and I loved every second of it. They are like
wolves going through a pack of puppies.The fighting was awesome and
Nuttal doesn't make the mistake of writing the bandits or Opposition
as complete chowderheads. They are clever and when they have
armaments equal to the Marines, a real threat. One thing I was kind
of edgy about was how the bandits raped a lot and it was definitely
used as a device to make them “Despicable”. It was never
described in detail but I just found it bordering on the tasteless
with how it was written.
The politics side of things felt a little too pat and easy but
considering that Captain Stalker has had to deal with Earth Politics,
whatever Avalon throws at him isn't nearly at the same level. I do
appreciate that Nuttal doesn't try to make his badguy characters to
be grey, ambiguous “oh, those poor misunderstood” type of
badguys. They are bad, period. Thank goodness for that.
Nuttal is an indie, as far as I can tell, but besides the repeated
misspelling of “deport” and its various forms, nothing stood out
(depot and depoted were the main culprits). At 500 pages, I was
expecting a lot more than that in all honesty. I enjoyed his writing
style and his characters had enough depth so they were unique and not
just the same character with a different name.
I do look forward to reading more in this series (there are 14 books
and it appears that book 14 is the final book) and if it works out,
I'll probably be trying other series by the author.
★★★☆☆
