What do you think?
Rate this book
BattleTech Universe #24
D.R.T.
Jeremiah Rose and the Black Thorns, flush with their success against the Jade Falcons on Borghese, head to Harlech to draw a new assignment. Their only requirement: Their new job must let them face off against the Clans.
They find more than they bargained for. Their assignment: Garrison duty on Wolcott - a Kurita planet deep in the heart of the Clan Smoke Jaguar occupation zone. Wolcott is besieged, but protected from further Clan aggression by the Clan code of honor.
Wolcott makes a useful staging area for Kurita raids on Smoke Jaguar-occupied territory.
The pay is good. The advance is unbelievable.
But they have to live to spend it.
They find more than they bargained for. Their assignment: Garrison duty on Wolcott - a Kurita planet deep in the heart of the Clan Smoke Jaguar occupation zone. Wolcott is besieged, but protected from further Clan aggression by the Clan code of honor.
Wolcott makes a useful staging area for Kurita raids on Smoke Jaguar-occupied territory.
The pay is good. The advance is unbelievable.
But they have to live to spend it.
288 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published May 1, 1994
18 people are currently reading
118 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
February 10, 2024
Dude, what happened?
I kinda liked Main Event, almost more in hindsight, but this, this is the first time where I feel like calling out the writing as bad, and in a way that Main Event was not. It is worse, because elements (non-story arc characters, a previously undetailed Clan, protagonist-side Kurita, a weirdly situated planet) make the premise sound like something I ought to love, but single finger curls inward, I suppose.
D.R.T. continues the story of the Black Rose mercenary group. Discovering that their previous job has resulted in something of a Pyrrhic victory in terms of maintenance costs (all Battletech players here now have a distant look in their eyes) and eager to act out their intended mission of fighting with the Clans despite the current outbreak of peace, they sign on with newly mercenary-accommodating Kurita for a mission to Wolcott.
I'm going to stop for the moment and mention that I think that Wolcott is the greatest blown opportunity for this novel. Wolcott is an Inner Sphere-controlled planet in Clan space. The truce means that this situation is going to be preserved, but the suggestion is that both sides are working the loopholes in the truce to persist in warring with one another. The mechanics of this are unexamined. But you really could make a book out of just that, particularly since you have not only the rules as set by the Il-Khan and ComStar but then the subrules of the Smoke Jaguars and Kurita. Plus there is great opportunity for actual science fictional problems and solutions.
But the mission to Wolcott is something of a red herring in the sense that it is more about the mission that the Black Thorns get on Wolcott. And here is possibly the most interesting part of the novel, which is the contract negotiations that operate outside of the context of the Outreach bonding system.
It is a bad sign with the best part of a military science fiction book is the contract law.
So the company is sent on a mission to Courcheval in Nova Cat territory. Things go wrong from the start. This remains the advantage of stories of the "lesser" characters of the universe, in that the author has full rights to put the characters into a total shitstorm, which creates better tension and feels more true to form on military action. Things happen, the good guys prevail, the novel ends.
There is a sort of fridge logic moment in realizing that
When I write "things happen," I mean it. The book feels like a parody of telling instead of showing. In the midst of descriptions of events, they will stop being described, so that the narrator can tell you what happened next, with then the events picking up afterwards.
And oh boy, are they things that are happening and not narrative. Nonsensical events happen, and while left with a sense of confusion about them, it will turn out some pages later that they are there to justify some other event. It is as if Chekov's Gun ends up on the stage by an actor pretending to break the fourth wall and steal it from an unruly audience member, then gets used in act three as if it were a natural part of the set.
And it is mostly things happening, and not people doing them. The characterization is wretched. Most of the Thorns are undescribed, rendering the fights bereft of tension because we don't care. Rose is a jerk, but this feels more like Rose was fantasy cast as someone like Bruce Campbell, and in that 90s action hero sort of way having the charisma to make the asshole entertaining and lovable. Rose's romance plot is insubstantial. There is the joke about how most romcoms would be 12 minutes long if people would stop and have a brief, honest conversation. This book is as if that conversation happens, but we still get the remaining hour and a half of movie of mostly resolved or resolving tension.
And the Clans, oh, the Clans. My expectation going in was that there were one, and then two, Clans that have gotten little representation in the books. One then does not appear at all in the book. The other does, and they are very different than the Clans as we have seen them. Or I must concede the ludicrous Clans as presented in this book might be just the way that the Nova Cats are. But the Clans here feel like the author read none of the other books. I do not like the Clans for various reasons, but these are they at maximal cardboard villain, which, again, drains all the tension out of the story. They do Clan things, but in a manner that comes off as a pastiche of previous description.
Characters show up and then get no business, or disappear from relevance. There are comedy bits attached to some characters and they fall flat. The Black Thorns do not feel like a mercenary unit, and in general, there is the sense that the author drew most of what he knew about the military from supplementary media.
I want to believe that this book would be okay if the author had skipped more to the action, even if telling some things in flashback or whatever, and I do think that the book would have been better in a simpler construction focused around the mission, but even with a storyline more focused on the showing and given room to breath, those same problems that weaken the rest of the book would weaken that hypothetical book.
And yeah, it pains me to write it, because again, there is a lot about this that is built out of the parts that I want to see, and my prior experience with the author suggests that he is a much better author than what he turned out here.
I kinda liked Main Event, almost more in hindsight, but this, this is the first time where I feel like calling out the writing as bad, and in a way that Main Event was not. It is worse, because elements (non-story arc characters, a previously undetailed Clan, protagonist-side Kurita, a weirdly situated planet) make the premise sound like something I ought to love, but single finger curls inward, I suppose.
D.R.T. continues the story of the Black Rose mercenary group. Discovering that their previous job has resulted in something of a Pyrrhic victory in terms of maintenance costs (all Battletech players here now have a distant look in their eyes) and eager to act out their intended mission of fighting with the Clans despite the current outbreak of peace, they sign on with newly mercenary-accommodating Kurita for a mission to Wolcott.
I'm going to stop for the moment and mention that I think that Wolcott is the greatest blown opportunity for this novel. Wolcott is an Inner Sphere-controlled planet in Clan space. The truce means that this situation is going to be preserved, but the suggestion is that both sides are working the loopholes in the truce to persist in warring with one another. The mechanics of this are unexamined. But you really could make a book out of just that, particularly since you have not only the rules as set by the Il-Khan and ComStar but then the subrules of the Smoke Jaguars and Kurita. Plus there is great opportunity for actual science fictional problems and solutions.
But the mission to Wolcott is something of a red herring in the sense that it is more about the mission that the Black Thorns get on Wolcott. And here is possibly the most interesting part of the novel, which is the contract negotiations that operate outside of the context of the Outreach bonding system.
It is a bad sign with the best part of a military science fiction book is the contract law.
So the company is sent on a mission to Courcheval in Nova Cat territory. Things go wrong from the start. This remains the advantage of stories of the "lesser" characters of the universe, in that the author has full rights to put the characters into a total shitstorm, which creates better tension and feels more true to form on military action. Things happen, the good guys prevail, the novel ends.
There is a sort of fridge logic moment in realizing that
When I write "things happen," I mean it. The book feels like a parody of telling instead of showing. In the midst of descriptions of events, they will stop being described, so that the narrator can tell you what happened next, with then the events picking up afterwards.
And oh boy, are they things that are happening and not narrative. Nonsensical events happen, and while left with a sense of confusion about them, it will turn out some pages later that they are there to justify some other event. It is as if Chekov's Gun ends up on the stage by an actor pretending to break the fourth wall and steal it from an unruly audience member, then gets used in act three as if it were a natural part of the set.
And it is mostly things happening, and not people doing them. The characterization is wretched. Most of the Thorns are undescribed, rendering the fights bereft of tension because we don't care. Rose is a jerk, but this feels more like Rose was fantasy cast as someone like Bruce Campbell, and in that 90s action hero sort of way having the charisma to make the asshole entertaining and lovable. Rose's romance plot is insubstantial. There is the joke about how most romcoms would be 12 minutes long if people would stop and have a brief, honest conversation. This book is as if that conversation happens, but we still get the remaining hour and a half of movie of mostly resolved or resolving tension.
And the Clans, oh, the Clans. My expectation going in was that there were one, and then two, Clans that have gotten little representation in the books. One then does not appear at all in the book. The other does, and they are very different than the Clans as we have seen them. Or I must concede the ludicrous Clans as presented in this book might be just the way that the Nova Cats are. But the Clans here feel like the author read none of the other books. I do not like the Clans for various reasons, but these are they at maximal cardboard villain, which, again, drains all the tension out of the story. They do Clan things, but in a manner that comes off as a pastiche of previous description.
Characters show up and then get no business, or disappear from relevance. There are comedy bits attached to some characters and they fall flat. The Black Thorns do not feel like a mercenary unit, and in general, there is the sense that the author drew most of what he knew about the military from supplementary media.
I want to believe that this book would be okay if the author had skipped more to the action, even if telling some things in flashback or whatever, and I do think that the book would have been better in a simpler construction focused around the mission, but even with a storyline more focused on the showing and given room to breath, those same problems that weaken the rest of the book would weaken that hypothetical book.
And yeah, it pains me to write it, because again, there is a lot about this that is built out of the parts that I want to see, and my prior experience with the author suggests that he is a much better author than what he turned out here.
September 30, 2020
A re-read for me of an old Battletech book - good fun if you like Battletech, maybe not so much if you don't.
April 8, 2019
Solid mercenary Battletech story
Highly recommended for Battletech fans, even new ones. Good story and an easy introduction to the universe. Liked it a lot.
Highly recommended for Battletech fans, even new ones. Good story and an easy introduction to the universe. Liked it a lot.
January 23, 2020
Awesome mercenary Battletech novel! Reading this while playing Battletech and Mechwarrior is just awesome!
March 22, 2020
Great read. Enjoyed rereading it on my tablet and adding it to my digital library. Wish there was more to the story to see what happens to be Black Thorns.
June 3, 2021
Book 23 of the BattleTech series, continuing Saga of the Black Thorns, sequel to Main Event. Black Thorns vs Nova Cats...
February 19, 2024
Story background was long and drawn out.
(Razor thinks the battletech machines are loud, smelly, and scary.)
(Razor thinks the battletech machines are loud, smelly, and scary.)
March 23, 2020
Started off fairly shakily (calling Stefan Amaris "Stephen Amaris", various other glitches that grated at the start of the novel).
Picked up when the action started, then a rather rushed ending to wrap everything up. Didn't really get any feeling for the characters, it mostly deals with the captain of the mercenary group, and everyone else just seems to be there to make up the numbers.
And the cover...good grief.
Picked up when the action started, then a rather rushed ending to wrap everything up. Didn't really get any feeling for the characters, it mostly deals with the captain of the mercenary group, and everyone else just seems to be there to make up the numbers.
And the cover...good grief.
February 7, 2017
Weird subset of Battletech novels. Some interesting ideas but less than idea execution.
October 17, 2012
For those who don't know d.r.t. means dead right there :)
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews