Book Cover
Title Redliners
Series ---
Author David Drake
Cover Art ---
Publisher Baen
First Printing Baen - 1996
Category Science Fiction
Warnings None


Main Characters

Farrell, Blohm, Abbado, Meyer, Gabrilovitch, Lock, Jafar al-Ibrahimi, Tamara Lundie
Main Elements Aliens
Website ---




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.




This book was once available on the Baen Free Library. It tells of an elite group of strikers after having been used beyond what they were psychologically able to handle (i.e. they were redlining). So they were sent on a special mission, to guard a group of civilians being sent to colonize a planet.

However right from the start things go wrong when they land in the wrong location. And this isn't your regular colony planet, absolutely everything there was designed to kill, from the insects, the trees and even the grasses. So now the strikers and the colonists must get out of the crater forest they've found themselves in and get to the original landing site that was prepared for them.

There were good points and bad points. Some of the good points were some interesting characters, some things that weren't as they seemed, and an interesting planetary challenge. The bad things were...well, there was a really long intro section where the strikers are fighting an alien race that only sets up the fact that they were used up. And then the forest was dangerous to a ridiculous extreme, just one crazy exploding/walking/shooting/flaming/bombing tree after another. Characters were killed off constantly. At some point I just started rolling my eyes figuring no one could survive this, my disbelief could not be avoided, though there is, ultimately, a reason for the over the top crazy forest and creatures...and wow, the humanoids on that world were kind of extreme. Plus this is a testosterone based book, lots of shooting and blowing things up, though there are many female characters, even amongst the strikers.

And as I got 11 pages to the end I began to wonder if the book wasn't complete, it wraps up rather abruptly. I also felt a bit sorry for the Khalendru, seemed an opportunity for both races to work together, although ultimately I guess it was explained why they could not. But until the very end, you'd think they'd at least try, rather than leaving a group of the aliens glued to a tree to die slowly...

So not quite my cup of team, but hey, it was free, and it wasn't terrible.




Posted: July 2016

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