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Scout’s Honor #1
Scout's Honor
When Terran Scout David Rice climbs from the wreckage of his starship’s escape pod, he finds himself transported from the space age to the steam age in the blink of an eye. Drawn to the sounds of fighting, David immediately throws himself into a desperate battle against overwhelming odds to save the life of a beautiful young princess.
Now, marooned without hope of rescue, David is swept into a world of steam-powered airships, treacherous pirates, brutal savages, bloodthirsty monsters, royal machinations, and plots within plots, where matters of strength and honor are most often settled with the clash of swords. As he struggles to learn the strange ways of this new world and who he can trust, one thing becomes clear to him: he must put aside his growing feelings for Her Highness and do everything in his power to return her to her family, even though this means giving her up to the prince she’s pledged to marry.
Told in a relentlessly fast-paced and breathless style, SCOUT’S HONOR is an exciting modern homage to the classic tales of planetary romance made famous by writers such as Edgar Rice Burroughs and Leigh Brackett, as well as the cliffhanger-driven energy of the early science fiction movie serials. If you like your heroes unabashedly heroic, your heroines feisty and true, and your plots filled with dangers, twists, turns, and double-crosses upon triple-crosses, you’ll enjoy SCOUT’S HONOR.
Now, marooned without hope of rescue, David is swept into a world of steam-powered airships, treacherous pirates, brutal savages, bloodthirsty monsters, royal machinations, and plots within plots, where matters of strength and honor are most often settled with the clash of swords. As he struggles to learn the strange ways of this new world and who he can trust, one thing becomes clear to him: he must put aside his growing feelings for Her Highness and do everything in his power to return her to her family, even though this means giving her up to the prince she’s pledged to marry.
Told in a relentlessly fast-paced and breathless style, SCOUT’S HONOR is an exciting modern homage to the classic tales of planetary romance made famous by writers such as Edgar Rice Burroughs and Leigh Brackett, as well as the cliffhanger-driven energy of the early science fiction movie serials. If you like your heroes unabashedly heroic, your heroines feisty and true, and your plots filled with dangers, twists, turns, and double-crosses upon triple-crosses, you’ll enjoy SCOUT’S HONOR.
226 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 24, 2014
36 people are currently reading
58 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
January 29, 2024
I really don’t know how to rate this book. It was a fun sword and planet read, yet many of the sword and planet themes were missing. There weren’t many of the exotic descriptions of terrain, history, nations, creatures etc. The character names were also pretty mundane for this type of story. No Kantos Kan or Tars Tarkas. The reading was set at a blistering pace, fun, yet cheesy at times.
May 22, 2020
This is a terrific science-fiction adventure. A wonderful homage to the Golden Age of Science Fiction; it made me nostalgic for the adventure books I used to read as a kid.
The story follows Terran Scout David Rice, who crash lands on a long-forgotten colony world. Although Rice enjoys some technological superiority over the natives, he must rely mostly on his own strength and wits to survive the harsh planet. What follows is a great page-turning adventure, with plenty of action, court intrigue, and just a sprinkling of romance.
I read a few other reviews of this, and honestly, I think some readers were just expecting the wrong kind of book. This isn't social sci-fi, or sci-fi used as a vehicle to explore philosophical concepts in the vein of Heinlein or Asimov. It's just a good old-fashioned fun adventure story. I enjoy "deep" sci-fi as much as anyone, but there are also times when I just want to kick back, forget about society's troubles, and enjoy a good yarn about daring heroes on exotic worlds. This book certainly delivers that.
The story follows Terran Scout David Rice, who crash lands on a long-forgotten colony world. Although Rice enjoys some technological superiority over the natives, he must rely mostly on his own strength and wits to survive the harsh planet. What follows is a great page-turning adventure, with plenty of action, court intrigue, and just a sprinkling of romance.
I read a few other reviews of this, and honestly, I think some readers were just expecting the wrong kind of book. This isn't social sci-fi, or sci-fi used as a vehicle to explore philosophical concepts in the vein of Heinlein or Asimov. It's just a good old-fashioned fun adventure story. I enjoy "deep" sci-fi as much as anyone, but there are also times when I just want to kick back, forget about society's troubles, and enjoy a good yarn about daring heroes on exotic worlds. This book certainly delivers that.
June 7, 2017
An old school action-and-adventure planetary romance. Indeed, part of the fun was the meta-effect of recognizing the old tropes.
Scout First Class David Rice jumps through a wormhole and lands in the most disasterous local possible: an asteroid belt. (With pulp SF concentration of asteroids, naturally.) He crash-lands, barely managing to do it non-lethally, and escapes with only one bag of supplies when his ship sinks into a lake. Shortly thereafter. a scream alerts him to a fight: a woman being guarded by two men, in a fierce sword fight against creatures only vaguely humanoid.
His assistance -- using his Boost abilities -- gets rid of the problem and has him collapse (a little side effect). When he regains consciousness, the surviving guard is afraid he's a raider, but he and the princess listen to his story. Leading into a break-neck pace of adventures that involve a prince, underground tunnels, a city on fire, how the princess had nearly been kidnapped on her fourth birthday, being given a sword, another Scout who crashed (and noted that not all of them were lucky enough to stumble on a princess), the humanoid trogs doing things they have never done before (like speak a human tongue), a sandstorm, and much more.
Scout First Class David Rice jumps through a wormhole and lands in the most disasterous local possible: an asteroid belt. (With pulp SF concentration of asteroids, naturally.) He crash-lands, barely managing to do it non-lethally, and escapes with only one bag of supplies when his ship sinks into a lake. Shortly thereafter. a scream alerts him to a fight: a woman being guarded by two men, in a fierce sword fight against creatures only vaguely humanoid.
His assistance -- using his Boost abilities -- gets rid of the problem and has him collapse (a little side effect). When he regains consciousness, the surviving guard is afraid he's a raider, but he and the princess listen to his story. Leading into a break-neck pace of adventures that involve a prince, underground tunnels, a city on fire, how the princess had nearly been kidnapped on her fourth birthday, being given a sword, another Scout who crashed (and noted that not all of them were lucky enough to stumble on a princess), the humanoid trogs doing things they have never done before (like speak a human tongue), a sandstorm, and much more.
July 7, 2020
The best way I can describe this is that it feels like the outline for a book at least twice as long, and not just because it is broken into a bunch of ~4 page chapters. The majority of the text is either dialogue or matter-of-fact action. Characters barely have any time to cope with new situations in a way that makes sense. Conflicts are introduced and then resolved within the next paragraph with hardly any tension. The entire book is written in first person from the perspective of the protagonist and yet you almost never hear his thoughts, aside from perhaps some very straightforward tactics before he kills another group of baddies.
This had the potential to be a light, fun action/romance story in the vein of classic sword and planet pulp sci-fi/fantasy, but the delivery is just falls flat. The plot is fine, the characters could be charming if given more room to breath, and the setting (what little of it you can glean from the complete lack of descriptive detail) has the potential for an interesting clash of space faring and steam technology. Unfortunately, everything feels rushed along (especially the character development) in a way that perhaps that author thought approximated break-neck pacing, but really feels like skimming over the surface of a story.
This had the potential to be a light, fun action/romance story in the vein of classic sword and planet pulp sci-fi/fantasy, but the delivery is just falls flat. The plot is fine, the characters could be charming if given more room to breath, and the setting (what little of it you can glean from the complete lack of descriptive detail) has the potential for an interesting clash of space faring and steam technology. Unfortunately, everything feels rushed along (especially the character development) in a way that perhaps that author thought approximated break-neck pacing, but really feels like skimming over the surface of a story.
April 1, 2022
This was a fun swashbuckling time. Definitely a good book to read when having a bad day.
Sword and Planet has almost disappeared from the landscape of genre fiction…but people like Henry Vogel are keeping it alive on the underground.
This books is an homage to the swashbuckling elements of the genre. It’s written at a blistering pace. Every chapter is 2-4 pages and ends on a cliffhanger. They almost feel like a strip of a comic that would appear weekly. This spartan prose makes it very digestible, and the unbelievably brisk tempo makes it unique.
That being said, it’s greatest strength is it’s greatest weakness. If you blink for even a second you might miss something important. The action is so unrelenting that there aren’t any moments to catch your breath.
I think what this book suffers from the most is a lack of wonder. Part of what makes Sword and Planet so compelling is the exotic backdrop. It’s science fiction with none of the science. It’s just rampant imagination. Because the writing is so spartan nothing takes you to those vistas that much of the genre did. Nothing captures your desire for wonder the way say Leigh Brackett’s Venus or ERB’s story “Amongst the Ancient Dead” does. That’s the one thing that’s really missing from this. It lacks the dreamlike quality of most Sword and Planet worlds.
Also, I know this is nitpicking, but that flows into the names too. Most of the names are mundane. If you’re writing a fantasy story and the captain of the guards is Robbil, don’t abbreviate it to Rob — it makes it feel too normal.
This books real nails swashbuckling adventure, and is a good time, it’s just a bit lacking in that it never feels like it places those sequences against a beautiful oil painted backdrop.
I’m really glad to see someone carrying the torch for Sword and Planet. I know there are 6 more of these and I’m looking forward to reading them. I really would recommend it to fans of the genre. It’s blistering pace and writing style make it unique, it just doesn’t feel quite exotic enough.
Still, this is a strong recommend to fans of the genre, and overall a solid book.
Sword and Planet has almost disappeared from the landscape of genre fiction…but people like Henry Vogel are keeping it alive on the underground.
This books is an homage to the swashbuckling elements of the genre. It’s written at a blistering pace. Every chapter is 2-4 pages and ends on a cliffhanger. They almost feel like a strip of a comic that would appear weekly. This spartan prose makes it very digestible, and the unbelievably brisk tempo makes it unique.
That being said, it’s greatest strength is it’s greatest weakness. If you blink for even a second you might miss something important. The action is so unrelenting that there aren’t any moments to catch your breath.
I think what this book suffers from the most is a lack of wonder. Part of what makes Sword and Planet so compelling is the exotic backdrop. It’s science fiction with none of the science. It’s just rampant imagination. Because the writing is so spartan nothing takes you to those vistas that much of the genre did. Nothing captures your desire for wonder the way say Leigh Brackett’s Venus or ERB’s story “Amongst the Ancient Dead” does. That’s the one thing that’s really missing from this. It lacks the dreamlike quality of most Sword and Planet worlds.
Also, I know this is nitpicking, but that flows into the names too. Most of the names are mundane. If you’re writing a fantasy story and the captain of the guards is Robbil, don’t abbreviate it to Rob — it makes it feel too normal.
This books real nails swashbuckling adventure, and is a good time, it’s just a bit lacking in that it never feels like it places those sequences against a beautiful oil painted backdrop.
I’m really glad to see someone carrying the torch for Sword and Planet. I know there are 6 more of these and I’m looking forward to reading them. I really would recommend it to fans of the genre. It’s blistering pace and writing style make it unique, it just doesn’t feel quite exotic enough.
Still, this is a strong recommend to fans of the genre, and overall a solid book.
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April 13, 2020I'm always impressed by this writer!
July 8, 2020
Loved it. A classic "Gary Stu" pulp-action story. Read it straight through. Almost every chapter ends with a cliffhanger, as if they are the chapters serialized in a pulp magazine.
July 12, 2021
I paid nothing for this book and still feel like I got robbed.
December 14, 2015
It's a rocketing story that gets much of its velocity from super-short chapters and a narrator with no internal life and no ability to storytell. This is a recitation of events without reflection or opinion, which in this format gives him a disturbingly flat affect and makes his motives entirely cryptic: When did he become attached enough to Princess Callan to swear an oath of loyalty? How, as a baseline fact, does he feel about being shipwrecked? Is it anything other than a small irritation to him?
It extends to descriptions of this alien world. There was one part where I was entirely surprised that the airship is steam powered, because there wasn't any indication that steam engines were a technology of the society and the picture in my head was so entirely different. Everything is like that: landscape, climate, clothing, are all blank slates.
It's a strange thing for a genre that revels in its own weirdness and, for Burroughs and others, frequently digresses into description.
It extends to descriptions of this alien world. There was one part where I was entirely surprised that the airship is steam powered, because there wasn't any indication that steam engines were a technology of the society and the picture in my head was so entirely different. Everything is like that: landscape, climate, clothing, are all blank slates.
It's a strange thing for a genre that revels in its own weirdness and, for Burroughs and others, frequently digresses into description.
September 14, 2016
Super-short chapters (2 to 3 pages) moved the story along at a break-neck pace without really going anywhere. Our hero is just jumping back and forth from frying pan to fire; trapped, escaping, trapped again, and rescuing the princess, losing the princess, then rescuing the princess again. There is very little character development or world building.
But.
It is not all bad. The story lacks depth, but it does have heart. At times it is fun, and the characters have potential. I get the feeling that I would have liked this more if I had read it when I was a teenager.
I'll probably give the next book a look at some point, but there is no rush to do so.
But.
It is not all bad. The story lacks depth, but it does have heart. At times it is fun, and the characters have potential. I get the feeling that I would have liked this more if I had read it when I was a teenager.
I'll probably give the next book a look at some point, but there is no rush to do so.
July 5, 2014
Short easy read, but too shallow
Too short and shallow to be satisfying. Insufficient character development for the story to create a world with enough depth for suspended disbelief.
Too short and shallow to be satisfying. Insufficient character development for the story to create a world with enough depth for suspended disbelief.
November 1, 2016
Great Tribute
This is a fun ride similar to John Carter of Mars. The characters are well developed and easy to relate to.
This is a fun ride similar to John Carter of Mars. The characters are well developed and easy to relate to.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews