Moscoe, Mike Books

They Also Serve

Mike Moscoe

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Fantasy Masquerading as SF 2 out of 5 stars.
12 of 14 people found this review helpful.

Moscoe returns to the Society of Humanity universe, and brings back the characters introduced in two earlier books. Then he has them lose their way in space and end up on a mysterious planet on the other side of the galaxy. A planet that just happens to be inhabited by humans from another lost ship, and happens to be home to supercomputer network that can do anything it wants, if it can just get its act together long enough.

While the individual characters are moderately interesting, the plot is completely pointless and arbitrary. Rules change as things go along, and the story really resembles a poorly developed Sword & Sorcery plot as much as anything else.

Harmless, Generally Speaking 3 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

I picked this one up because I needed commute reading. Over-all, it's unobjectionable, a fast read. It's not memorable and if you've read as much SF as I have, it was predictable. So what? It did its job, and the story was fun.

There were a couple things I thought could have been better. We have a lost colony plunked down on a "teaching" world that can't seem to make contact with the colonists. I don't find that convincing on its face, but I let it ride. I object more seriously to the ending, which I won't give away, though you can probably guess it. Moscoe ducked the serious issue of co-existence with true machine intelligence. That, by the way, is fair enough. If what you want to write is entertainment, then you don't need to get into the whole messy issue of what sentience is, and how do you deal with the other.

Moscoe comes down on the "Can't we all just get along?" end of the spectrum. The main characters started out on different sides and finished close friends. No one is a goody-two-shoes, but when a character is portrayed as a seriously bad person, the driving force behind that personality (utter selfishness) is well potrayed and consistent. There are the usual clueless civilians, which I found tiresome, but hey. Most military types view civilians as easiest to protect by ensuring they never get close to the action.

There was a fault of diction that drove me bats. Moscoe, at least twice, uses "disburse" for "disperse." Anyone who doesn't understand the different roots of these two words should see me after class...well, no. Let me explain. Disperse comes from the Latin "dispersus", which comes from particle dis + spargere "to strew." Thus, English disperse, meaning "to scatter" in its briefest definition. Got that?

Disburse comes from Old French, composed of the Latin particle dis + Old French bourse, which means purse in the sense of "where you keep your money." So we arrive at English "disburse", meaning "to pay out."

They are nowhere near being the same word, and it made me squawk. May a decently educated reader ask who is proof-reading this stuff? There was other stuff, but the disburse for disperse was egregious!

Anyway, as I said, harmless. Read it in paper, and then sell it.

Editorial Review:

Adversaries in an interstellar war are now working together to keep the peace. But can they protect themselves from an enemy they can't even see?

First Casualty

Michael Moscoe

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

A good war story in space. 4 out of 5 stars.
7 of 8 people found this review helpful.

Moscoe has a nice clean writing style that provides just the right level of detail to form his universe and the fighting situations. I enjoy a good sci-fi war story and the author provides it. The central characters are divided between a ground based marine fighting unit and a ship based "naval" unit, and the two story lines merge to climax a good tale.

Seemed "average" to me..... 3 out of 5 stars.
5 of 8 people found this review helpful.

Good space battles between ships, but some of the physics involved seemed "wrong" to me. Maybe I shouldn't gripe about physics in a book involving FTL space flight, but when a ship accellerates at 3 gees for several days, it should have to decellerate at the same rate for the same time as well. Too often the ships just seem to come to a stop, or at least the author doesn't describe that several days of braking were involved. Minor gripe? Possibly, and I for one could have done without the sappy and cliche drama of Major Longknife and his wife as well. It's an okay book if you're just looking for some mindless entertainment, but thought-provoking, it is not.

Editorial Review:

Two green draftees of the Society of Humanity. Two career soldiers invested with the cause of the United Colonies. These four soldiers on opposing sides of battle are about to discover the true nature of this terrible war--a quest for profit--from the high command of both sides. What they will risk is nothing less than their lives. For although truth is the first casualty of war, it won't be the last.

The Price of Peace

Mike Moscoe

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

The Price of Peace 4 out of 5 stars.
11 of 13 people found this review helpful.

Body>When Lieutenant Terrance "Trouble" Tordon looks at the space ship Patton and at its captain, he questions his good sense for the first time. Captain Izzy Umboto is obviously a loose cannon. He questions her sanity as well, for accepting the Patton, a bucket of bolts which appears to be on its last leg. Still, Trouble is committed to the Marine Corps, so he vows to do his best. Trouble is captured by the slave drivers who have enslaved farmers to work their crops of illicit drugs. On his first night of captivity, he meets a young woman Ruth who embodies everything he does not want, including love and commitment. Enduring torture and humiliation, Trouble and Ruth manage to retain their dignity and their belief that they will be rescued. Meanwhile, Captain Izzy is doing her best to do just that, rescue the men who depended on her. It comes down to a battle, not to win the war, but to maintain the peace, and to exact whatever price may be required. But can peace be worth human lives and dignity? Mike Moscoe's The Price of Peace is action-packed and exciting space adventure, but it's also a love story, an exploration of the lengths to which sentient beings will go to maintain power and to maintain dignity, and it's a peek into the human psyche. The Price of Peace satisfies on many levels, including just plain entertainment.

Editorial Review:

In the wake of the war between the Society of Humanity and the Unity Party, military ship captain Inez Umboto and Lieutenant Terrance "Trouble" Tordon patrol the universe. But in the no-man's-land of Rim Space, pirates roam freely. And Umboto and Tordon will soon learn that enforcing the peace can be just as expensive as fighting the war...

"A Major New Talent."-- Nebula Award-winning author Robert J. Sawyer

Moscoe is also the author of The Lost Millennium trilogy, called "a terrific blend of time travel and ancient war"(Steve Perry)

Lost Millenium 2: Second Fire (Lost Millennium, No 2)

Michael Moscoe

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Tightly written novel of warfare 6000 years ago 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

The is a wonderful book. I sat down to read for a half hour or so, and burned dinner because I couldn't put it down until I was finished. Being a writer myself, I am extremely critical of what I read, especially SF &F. I forgot all about criticism within the first ten pages. I guarantee you that if you pick this one up you will not put it down willingly. I don't want to give anything away, but this has a killer ending

Excellent 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful.

This book was different from anything I have ever read. I enjoyed the book. It was one of the first books I've read where I seriously had no idea what would happen next. Mike writes well. l was surprised at a few of the developments in the story, but that's what really made the book stand above the last few books I've read - it wasn't predictable

Editorial Review:

When a designer plague threatens to engulf Earth, two twenty-first-century soldiers--Launa O'Brian and Jack Walking Bear--journey back in time to 4000 B.C., where they must change the history of a wise and peaceful tribe. Original."

Lost millenium iii: lost days (Lost Millennium, No. 3)

Michael Moscoe

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A worthy entry to the series 4 out of 5 stars.
4 of 5 people found this review helpful.

If you have read the first two books in this series, you should be sure to pick this one up as well. Mike Moscoe has a talent for describing battle scenes, and he puts that talent to good use here.

There are a few twists that set this one apart from the first two books. The author lets us see what the 21st century would be like if events followed the course of books one and two. Also, the Kurgans are joined in Lost Days by clans from the far east. Moscoe leans heavily on the relationship tensions between all the main characters to keep dramatic tension going, and as always, the build up to battle is the main focus.

I had a few concerns with this book: The last two or three chapters seemed like they were written in a rush, and could have used one more edit. I found a number of typos, and it was not clear what had become of some characters. Moscoe was clearly leaving the door open for another sequel, but I still felt the ending could have given more details than it did. Even so, I enjoyed the book thoroughly and would recommend it to Lost Millennium fans.

Editorial Review:

A designer plague threatens every living thing on earth...and a desperate world sends two 21st-century soldiers back in time to win a war lost six thousand years ago. Now, in the thrilling follow-up to First Dawn and Second Fire, Lieutenant Launa O'Brian and Captain Jack Walking Bear return from 4,000 B.C.--and discover a radically changed civilization, and a society infested with a different sort of plague...

* First Dawn was a Locus Recommended Novel, hailed as a fine debut by the Salem Statesman Journal
* Mike Moscoe is a major new talent.--Robert J. Sawyer, Nebula Award-winning author of Starplex

Lost Millenium 1: First Dawn (Lost Millennium, No 1)

Michael Moscoe

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Unworkable premise, bad heros 1 out of 5 stars.
14 of 17 people found this review helpful.

I was very excited about this new series after reading the reviews here. It turned out though that I had misinterpreted what people were saying about a more peaceful society run by women. I had assumed that the time travelers were going to go back in time to begin such a society. It turns out that they were going back in time to save this natural order of things from the evil male dominated society of the horse people. By saving the peaceful society from the one invasion which brought evil into the world, there would never be any warfare, and all the problems of the present day, 6,000 years later, would be instantly erased.

Although there are many things that bother me about this, the most obvious is that Europe was invaded by Nomadic Barbarians from the Steppe many many times. It makes me wonder if the author has ever heard of the Mongols, the Huns, or the Doric invasion. Even if you assume that the first invasion of peaceful farmers by ravaging nomadic horsemen occurred around 4,000 BC, stopping that one invasion wouldn't stop the future invasions.

The next problem is the author's premise that evil barbarity must come off the steppe, simply because our best guess at archeology and anthropology is that it happened that way in our past. In my opinion, even if you brought a nuclear arsenal back in time and created a radioactive dead zone from the Black Sea to the Baltic, so that Europe could never be invaded from the steppe, the peaceful farmers would eventually develop more complex societies that would come into conflict with each other and develop warfare on their own.

What made Old Europeans peaceful in 4,000 BC was the low population density relative to the abundance of natural resources. If you increase the population density so that one group of people is crowded against another, the feeling of cooperation with your neighbor is likely to shift to competitive resentment. This leads in a natural progression to an us vs. them mentality, and open fighting. I don't believe that Europe's long history of killing neighbors to take their land derives from the Nomadic invasions of horse people.

Although I think these starting premises preclude any possibility of a thoughtful and provoking story, the author didn't even make a good attempt. In the very first chapter, the woman, who is supposed to be in command but never really overcomes her own doubts and indecision, runs away in the face of the enemy, leaving her partner for dead. Now I was in the Navy not the Marines or Army, but I would think someone on patrol, particularly a West Point Cadet, would come and check the pulse before running away and leaving their squadmate. Maybe this is more realistic under the circumstances, but it certainly isn't heroic, something I look for in characters I read about. When the battle is over, and they're both alive, they don't feel any remorse for the string of mistakes which got the best 20% of their fighting force killed (the Great Dane). They make no effort at a Lessons Learned so they can do better next time. Instead they feel guilt and trauma about killing the bad guys in self-defense. It somehow makes them feel better to destroy the valuable hand made stone knives they took from the enemy dead, rather than keeping them for use by the peaceful farmers they are trying to save. It goes down hill from there.

Basically, this is a story about people I don't respect, on a pointless mission, in a poorly thought out and implausible world. I would give it zero or negative stars if I could.

Editorial Review:

From a future ravaged by plague, the first time travelers travel thousands of years into the past, to the dawn of civilization and primitive hunters, where they will trace a fatal chain of events and alter history to save humanity from itself.

Patriot's Stand: A Battletech Novel (Mechwarrior: Dark Age, No. 9)

Mike Moscoe

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Had Potential 1 out of 5 stars.
2 of 4 people found this review helpful.

While this story had a great plot going for it, it fell short in most other areas. It was intensly boring and had close to no action aside from beginning and the end, and it was based on a tiny insignificant little planet. This HAD potential but it was wasted.

Another disappointing MW:DA novel 1 out of 5 stars.
1 of 3 people found this review helpful.

This book was pure torture to read. The characters were mostly sterotypical and, as with many of the MW:DA novels, I didn't really care what happened to them.
The battles in this book were extremely unbelievable and annoying. Somehow minners and farmers who had little to no training or experiance and piloted Industial Mechs were able to land hit after hit, while elite and experianced mercenaries piloting battlemechs missed their shots almost every time.
This was one of those books where you find yourself hoping for the "bad guys" to win. I'd advise anyone who dislikes constant pain while reading to avoid this book.

Editorial Review:

Grace O'Malley's ragtag forces stand valiantly against the fearsome Roughriders-determined to write their planet's history in the scorched wreckage of the battlefield...