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BattleTech Universe #42
Battletech 40: Shadows of War
Learning of a heavily guarded secret route to the homeworld of Clan Smoke Jaguar, the Lords of the Successor States have managed to put aside their differences and create Operation Serpent, a mighty invasion force that launches an all-out assault on the Jaguar Clan. After brutal fighting with heavy losses on both sides, victory for the Defense Force is close at hand, but when a few Clan warriors escape to spread the alarm, the Successor States find themselves in the fight of their lives!.
288 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published September 1, 1998
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
November 11, 2024
Loved all the action! Gressman writes in such a way that I “see” and “feel” the action in 3-D all around me; it’s very fluidly written.
January 16, 2026
The book is a war story. The protagonists spend most of their time on the back foot. There are no Mary Sues. I would write that it steals from Saving Private Ryan, which it is contemporary to, except that both it and the movie are stealing from the same other things. In specific, this is a Inner Sphere go at the "one from Brooklyn, one from Nebraska," war movie trope of the squad as built up of stereotypes who learn to see past their differences for the sake of God and Country, maybe with the exception that these are officers rather than grunts.
I like this sort of thing, so there is potential. Instead, this is in contention for the worst of the series so far. (EDIT: I did rank it the worst.)
To start at what annoys me the most, the book uses the trope of PTSD as cured by better violence. This is a lousy representation of trauma as bad dreams and cowardice. Mental health does not work this way, and it is not something that gets 'fixed' in a singular moment of heroic effort. If you think this argument is woke, you do not know the foundational texts of the Western corpus well enough to know what you are talking about.
If this represented a science fiction author pulling for commonly used tropes of war stories, I would understand. Instead, this is an author who always wants to establish his militarist bona fides. I mentioned previously about this author the oddity of so many military traditions being consistent from 20th century U.S. armed services practices, despite it being about 900 years later and the historical and cultural background distinctly not that of the United States.
I did not explain how badly written it is when he does that.The author's way of show, then explain becomes formulaic. Take a drink each time you read something like this:
It is bad because it is formulaic. It is bad because it is showy, the author looking to impress you with knowledge. It is bad because it is bad writing. If your use of terms are not clear with context, that usually means that you are doing a poor job of writing.
The poorest job of writing is with the interrelation with the other books. Again, this is something that I am inclined to allow a greater tolerance for. Different authors have different interests, and canhave different interpretations of characters. In some cases, like with VSD, this has been outright productive in creating depth and complexity. Here it has the effect of reading like bad improv.
It is so bad that I have to wonder if this book series was written before, or otherwise without the benefit of, Exodus Road or entropic war speech and premise an objective around destroying an enemy, then follow it up with dulce et decorum est-y principles. Hand-wringing, yes; actualization, no.
Luckily (?) the Inner Sphere is written equally poorly. Here they are Flanderized to the extreme, with the same problem as Highlander Gambit where the author spends all the Orientalist cliches on Kurita and so cannot even manage a flavor for Liao. Kurita is the worst here, where the author exhibits an anime club-grade level of Japanese culture and offers none of the sort of fun re-contextualization it has in earlier books of the earlier books. It is, more or less, as bad for all the different factions on display, most notably the Lyrans and the Knights of the Sphere, both of whom have one shtick, neither that makes much sense or has much weight to it.
As such, I have to complain about the ninja.
They skip past trope and cliche and end up in trite, complete with the sort of magical powers that diminish the weight of the war story. My major complaint, and the moment that I did throw the book across the room, is a spoiler as to their use in the plot, where the commanding officer As it is, all of them should have been court marshaled.
And if we are talking about spoiler-y choices that ruin the book, you know that things are bad when I am complaining about VSD not appearing at all in the book. But it matters because Hitchcock's bomb: it is not a good idea, it is the law.
In summary, it is easy to want to grade on a curve for this sort of work and judge it on the basis of how fun the rock 'em sock 'em is, but unforced errors cut into that itself.
I like this sort of thing, so there is potential. Instead, this is in contention for the worst of the series so far. (EDIT: I did rank it the worst.)
To start at what annoys me the most, the book uses the trope of PTSD as cured by better violence. This is a lousy representation of trauma as bad dreams and cowardice. Mental health does not work this way, and it is not something that gets 'fixed' in a singular moment of heroic effort. If you think this argument is woke, you do not know the foundational texts of the Western corpus well enough to know what you are talking about.
If this represented a science fiction author pulling for commonly used tropes of war stories, I would understand. Instead, this is an author who always wants to establish his militarist bona fides. I mentioned previously about this author the oddity of so many military traditions being consistent from 20th century U.S. armed services practices, despite it being about 900 years later and the historical and cultural background distinctly not that of the United States.
I did not explain how badly written it is when he does that.The author's way of show, then explain becomes formulaic. Take a drink each time you read something like this:
"Are they flying under the radar?" she asked.
"yes, the radio detection and ranging, is not picking up anything," she replied, "as you know if planes are close enough to the ground, they can make using it difficult." They were discussing aerospace fighters rather than planes, of course, but since the wars of the 20th Century 'planes' was used to refer to anything detected on radar.
It is bad because it is formulaic. It is bad because it is showy, the author looking to impress you with knowledge. It is bad because it is bad writing. If your use of terms are not clear with context, that usually means that you are doing a poor job of writing.
The poorest job of writing is with the interrelation with the other books. Again, this is something that I am inclined to allow a greater tolerance for. Different authors have different interests, and canhave different interpretations of characters. In some cases, like with VSD, this has been outright productive in creating depth and complexity. Here it has the effect of reading like bad improv.
It is so bad that I have to wonder if this book series was written before, or otherwise without the benefit of, Exodus Road or entropic war speech and premise an objective around destroying an enemy, then follow it up with dulce et decorum est-y principles. Hand-wringing, yes; actualization, no.
Luckily (?) the Inner Sphere is written equally poorly. Here they are Flanderized to the extreme, with the same problem as Highlander Gambit where the author spends all the Orientalist cliches on Kurita and so cannot even manage a flavor for Liao. Kurita is the worst here, where the author exhibits an anime club-grade level of Japanese culture and offers none of the sort of fun re-contextualization it has in earlier books of the earlier books. It is, more or less, as bad for all the different factions on display, most notably the Lyrans and the Knights of the Sphere, both of whom have one shtick, neither that makes much sense or has much weight to it.
As such, I have to complain about the ninja.
They skip past trope and cliche and end up in trite, complete with the sort of magical powers that diminish the weight of the war story. My major complaint, and the moment that I did throw the book across the room, is a spoiler as to their use in the plot, where the commanding officer As it is, all of them should have been court marshaled.
And if we are talking about spoiler-y choices that ruin the book, you know that things are bad when I am complaining about VSD not appearing at all in the book. But it matters because Hitchcock's bomb: it is not a good idea, it is the law.
In summary, it is easy to want to grade on a curve for this sort of work and judge it on the basis of how fun the rock 'em sock 'em is, but unforced errors cut into that itself.
August 8, 2022
Twilight of the Clans 6
Clan Smoke Jaguar attempts to take back their homeworld after the invasion by the Inner Sphere.
A much better read than book 5, which was by the same author.
Lots more action, plenty of hard fought and lethal mech battles that don't always go the way of the Inner Sphere troops. Also gives a good account of some of the smaller actions by the commando teams.
Clan Smoke Jaguar attempts to take back their homeworld after the invasion by the Inner Sphere.
A much better read than book 5, which was by the same author.
Lots more action, plenty of hard fought and lethal mech battles that don't always go the way of the Inner Sphere troops. Also gives a good account of some of the smaller actions by the commando teams.
October 29, 2019
Great book with lots of battles... I love the Battletech universe!
January 8, 2020
Far denser and more action packed than all the previous entries in this series.
October 15, 2021
Book 42 of the BattleTech Series, and Book 6 of the Twilight of the Clans. The initial invasion of Task Force Serpent succeeded, but now they have to hold what was won.
June 24, 2022
Awesome book with a lot of battles. One of the best in the Twilight of the Clans saga.
April 8, 2025
One of the better Twilight of the Clans books, just an absolute slog of combat on Huntress. Ariana Winston joins Andrew Redburn as one of my favorite characters in Battletech
April 11, 2017
I just did not care about a single character in Task Force Serpent.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews