As I read the first in this series, Star Rebel, earlier this month, of course I picked it up right away. I figure if I did not, I might not pick it up and “complete” the series for a couple of years–witness how long it’s been since I picked up Iroshi by Cary Osborn–five years–without picking the second book in the trilogy there because I was unimpressed with the first book in it.
Joe at Glorious Trash has completed Busby’s The Demu Trilogy, and he was unimpressed. But I think this book was okay–as I’ve mentioned, it’s been a few years since I read The Demu Trilogy, but I think I am coming to understand F.M. Busby’s writing: He’s more of a short story writer stringing together incidents and episodes, perhaps with some idea where they’re going but perhaps not.
This book picks up where the last left off. Bran Tregare, a member, but of an outcast branch, of a wealthy Earthborn concern has survived the UET military academy, survived serving his first tour aboard a ship with The Butcher, a captain known for throwing cadets out of the airlock for minor infractions, and he has participated in a mutiny that liberates an armed UET ship for him to command. His situational brutality, however, has caused his lover to have second thoughts about him, so she has left him. And we start this book….
Well, the book is basically a series of episodes where Tregare and his crew travel to different planets and meet different people. He buys a load of slave women from a captain who was treating them humanely; he picks up a new second, a black woman who was captured from a Earthen gang; and so on. They’re episodic in the way that, say, Star Trek was: The ship goes somewhere, something happens/they do something, and they move on in the next chapter. Some characters are introduced, some leave the main story line, and then we get to an end where Tregare marries an agent of his family’s organization, a woman from another of Busby’s series and they deal with a family of assassins on the Hulzein outcasts’ new world. But the book leaves off with him preparing to assemble his fleet of ships to take first Stronghold and then, presumably, Earth–or maybe the other way around.
The back of the book says:
REBEL’S QUEST is the final chapter in the Hulzein Chronicles, bringing this monumental saga to a resounding conclusion.
Uh, this is the second book of what looks to be (now that I looked it up) a four-book series. So I guess it makes sense that it ends with threads unresolved.
I don’t know if Busby was padding this out to be a four-book deal, or a trilogy, but this book does not advance the main story arc a whole lot. Instead of padding, though, I think Busby probably just liked the character and wanted to throw him into some adventures.
But my previous sentiment continues to hold true: Pretty lightweight rocket jockey stuff with a lot of sex thrown in. Not graphic sex, but Tregare gets his share, from the black warrior woman to the wild child of a backslid culture whose colony returned to wild when the last ship to visit could not lift again and other encounters that are described as occuring, but not too graphic.
So if I fall over other books in the series for fifty cents each, I’ll pick them up. I don’t know that I will look for them in used book stores, but now that I said I won’t, I probably will.
