Jun 212013
Redliners
The troops of Strike Force Company C41 were given a final mission: guard a colony sent to a hell planet. When the mission went horribly wrong, they found their lives on the line as never before.
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Redliners, good action book.,
Redliners by David Drake Redline is an enjoyable book by David Drake. It is cover to cover action but has some space for plot and character development. There is more profanity than is usual for Drake but there is more depth to the characters. Redline is a widely used word, to a mechanic it means pushing a machine past its design tolerances. To an accountant it describes a situation where risk likely exceeds gain. To Rudyard Kipling it meant the thin red line of redcoated soldiers protecting the British Empire. In David Drake’s book it means all these things and one thing more, it refers to a redline across a service record when the stress of battle makes the soldier dangerous to all around him. Redliners is an interesting science fiction book. Like many of Drakes books the main characters are professional soldiers doing their job. The action is exciting and the emotional reactions believable. The concept of bureaucratic injustice or personal injustice is balanced against the pragmatic of “it was necessary”. The book starts with a battle against an alien enemy the Kalendru. The human soldiers are company C41, spec-ops called strikers, who invade a space port on a colony to disable its C&C as a prelude to full invasion. Drake breaks the plot into several lines and switches between each showing significant events from several viewpoints. This simulates the chaos of war and builds suspense, although it does make the main plot hard to follow at times. Later, when C41 guards a colony sent to a hell planet, the same actions are taken as in the initial invasion, not against a enemy alien, but toward a brutally hostile environment. The similarities help underscore the emotional battles the strikers have with the way they now behave and the way normal folk act. Lethal brute force verses patient social discourse. The civilian colonists are fearful of the strikers at first but eventually realize that on the colony world the striker’s attitudes are the difference between life and death. The colonist’s gratitude is the first indication the strikers have that what they do matters and this helps redeem many of them.
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|No movie of the week,
I’ll start off by admitting that I’m a David Drake fan, so until he screws up badly, my reviews are going to be positive. This novel is a nice twist because, while it has a military theme, it has no relationship to the Hammer’s Slammers Series. It’s about what happens to elite soldiers when they have been in combat too long. The government tries to give them a break by having them do guard duty for colonists. Unfortunately things go badly wrong, and they are thrust back into combat, but this time they have to do something other than fight and move. It’s a good exploration of the difficult process of bringing combat soldiers home. The author handles it well by not turning it into a movie-of-the-week tear-jerker but leaves the philosophical analysis to the reader while putting the premise in the context of a great action novel.
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|An amazing portrait of the Warrior.,
As a long time Drake fan, and a career soldier, I was amazed and moved by this book. Redliners shows the effects of combat on the combatants, and includes the distaste felt by the civilians for those same combatants. I can relate to all the attitudes expressed. The characters are extremely well-written, and show a depth that is hard to find in a “War” book. I feel that this should be a required read in a Government, or Social Studies class. Bless you, David Drake.
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