Book Series Review: Undying Mercenaries

All 19 books...

Pre-Spoilers Summary: A solidly mediocre pulp sci-fi series: kind of fun and interesting, easy to read, but slightly irritating if you pay attention. Not worth buying individually unless you are a fan of the genre and desperate for content, but probably worth a month or two of Amazon Unlimited to read all 19 for no additional price.

Spoilers ahead.

Every book is titled “[Noun] World.” Really.

About three months ago I did something rather unusual for me: I picked up a book based on the recommendation of someone in a comments thread somewhere. I am usually pretty picky about who I take recommendations from, but I had a long work trip coming up and I like to have some easy to read fun fiction for the plan and hotel room. So I picked up Undying Mercenaries book one, Steel World, by B.V. Larson. It turned out to be pretty good, and over the next 6-8 weeks I read the rest of the series.

The story begins...

A few centuries hence Earth is annexed by the Galactic Empire, a highly advanced conglomerate empire of aliens from the Core Worlds of the Milky Way. Humanity is considered barbaric, in a poor, rather irrelevant fringe province of the empire. Think Gauls vis a vie the early Roman Empire, a theme that runs through the series.

The Galactics are extremely callous towards the lesser species of their empire, wiping out worlds at the drop of a hat. To remain part of the empire, every species must produce one trade good per planet they occupy to feed into the empire’s trade network and justify their existence, or face extinction. The species then has a monopoly on that product until and unless another species can prove they can provide a better alternative product, at which point the original species had better find a new one, and quick. Otherwise that species is out of the empire, and will soon be out of existence. This gets pretty specific, from producing a particular type of weapon or machine to manning space faring vessels.

Earth, being filled with backwards savages like us, turns out to have nothing really to offer other civilizations except our aforementioned savagery, and so puts together Legions that are rented out to other civilizations for all the usual military roles. So we have the mercenaries part.

The undying part of the series title comes from Earth’s legions’ use of another planet’s export, revival machines. Effectively large biomechanical 3d printers that can remake a human from a data file in an hour or so, the legions use the revival machines as effectively respawn points from a video game. Every legionary’s mental state is updated so long as they are within wifi distance, so when they are confirmed dead (duplicates are illegal and get your species wiped) a new body is printed out with the updated memories and you are back to life and ready to go. Legionaries are thus effectively immortal, retaining skills and experience for ever, so long as they only die in wifi range.

That last sentence fragment is important, however. Get captured or die in a non-confirmable manner and you are permanently dead, “permed,” as the Hegemony of Earth isn’t going to risk species extinction for violating Galactic Law and creating a duplicate of you. Likewise, die outside of wifi (or have the iphone-esque “tapper” imbedded in your arm damaged) and you won’t have updated memories when you get revived.

This turns out to be a pretty clever narrative device, as while the usual plot armor considerations can be weakened (characters die, a lot), there is no particular danger unless in particular circumstances, which are then highlighted in terms of risk.

All this is pretty good, putting humanity on the path to space exploration and power. Sure, the equipment they can afford is mostly C tier hand-me-downs from the Galactics, and the species is in constant risk of extinction from breaking the laws or otherwise the whims of their alien overlords who classify humans as a “swam or shoal, beneath individuals”, but humans are beginning to make their mark in their remote province of the Empire.

Into this world comes James McGill, an indifferent college student who plays lots of videogames. His parents lose their job, forcing him to drop out and join the legions to make ends meet. As it turns out McGill is kind of a screwup renegade type, and so after a battery of mental and physical tests he is only accepted into Legion Varus, the bottom of the barrel legion.

Yes, they named one of their legions after the Roman general responsible for one of the biggest losses for Rome since Cannae. We’ll get to that.

McGill goes out into the stars, and starts a career where he is inexplicably the center of everything that happens, among the roughest and readiest Legion ever to come out of Earth, taking on the worst jobs in the galaxy.

The Good

Our author Mr. Larson seems to really enjoy video games and military adventure stories. I can’t be sure, but I would wager he is very familiar with Warhammer 40k, Heinlein’s work especially Starship Troopers, as well as the Flashman series by G. M. Fraser. Indeed, McGill is very much a Flashman type character, kind of a ladies man and scoundrel, although without Flashman’s cowardice or self awareness¹, who manages to take part in nearly all the pivotal events of his day. (Of course, being perpetually 26 over the course of decades helps that make sense.)

This obvious love of the genre does a lot for the storytelling; in many instances it just feels right. I found myself periodically thinking “oh, that’s a clever angle” on some application or allusion to other work. Tying the future legions operating as auxiliaries to the Galactics to the Roman era, a favorite historical period of mine, was nice as well. The setting really lends itself well to almost Star Trek levels of “new planet of the week” explorations.

An angle I particularly appreciated is how much aliens just don’t like each other, and how, well, alien they are. Most species, from sentient dinosaur Saurians, distributed intelligent plant Wur, weird, I don’t know, spider thing Mogwa up to moon sized artificial biomechanical Skay, all tend to have at least moderately developed traits and generally don’t get along. This isn’t a rainbow pride diversity galaxy, and most species find each other only tolerable at best, with the powerful races from the Galactic Core looking at the rest as little more than clever animals. To my mind this cleaves a little closer to verisimilitude than the “every alien is just another cool guy” so common in other sci-fi series. Species have their own natures, which may or may not jive well with the inherent natures of other species, and some are just assholes. This helps prevent the aliens from falling into the Star Trek “planet of hats” problem. Sometimes…

In line with the “aliens are bastards, too” theme, humanity itself is also portrayed as the morally grey mixed bag of dicks we know it to be. While not exactly competing in the Game of Thrones space when it comes to political intrigue and back stabbing, Undying Mercenaries is rife with intra-species conflict from the human standpoint, and often the story is as much about internecine conflict as which new alien we are going to meet and kill this time².

The Bad

Go get a drink, this will be a while…

Alright, while this series isn’t bad, Larson commits some literary sins that really bug me, the kind of things that just pulled me out of the story saying “Wait… what the hell?” I don’t know much about the guy other than he seems to write about a book a week between this and other series I see on Amazon. Were it not for that I would call these rookie mistakes, but, well… I will just start on them by topic

-Time

This is probably the most frustrating for me. The first book in the series, Steel World, throws out a lot of dates, how long it has been since the Unification Wars on Earth, how long since the Galactics showed up, how long since the Legions were formed, how old people are, etc. There is a fair bit of thought put into the timeline and where are characters are in it.

The next 18 books do not list a single date.

The timeline between books, and sometimes even within a single book, starts to make no sense. Based on the characters’ daughter conceived in book 2, there is something like 5 years between books, 2 and 3, then another 4 tween 3 and 4, then 5 or so, then 10? Yet the narrator (McGill) describes it as 20 years sometimes, or 30, or whatever. It is all over the place, to the point that every time someone says something to the effect of “It was X years since the campaign on Y World”³ I stopped and thought “Wait… is that even possible? If she was 24 at the beginning of the book, that means it was only 14 years since that book…”

This is almost acceptable in the between book times, as basically the story beat is “book happens where characters are called up for duty, and between books they are discharged and screw around for months, maybe years.” That is awkward for the reader when there is never and explanation of the time between deployments, but not the worst and it does give the author some flexibility if the time line needs some gaps between books. It does, however, yank one out of the story at times when it is really obvious that the author doesn’t know how much time has passed, either.

It isn’t acceptable when it happens within a book, however. Although I didn’t note every instance, there are a few cases of e.g. McGill leaving his unit for a couple of weeks, then returning only to have members of his unit act as though he was there the whole time, talking to him as though it was merely the next morning. This isn’t as common a problem, but it happens a lot more frequently than it should. I can accept that sometimes characters working together don’t see each other every day, so they might not notice when someone is gone for a bit, but when an active duty soldier who is trackable via technology embedded in his body and is perfectly trackable by his superiors can disappear for for days at a time and no one seems to notice, well I take that to mean the author just lost track. At the very least it makes you stop and say “Wait… what?” and flip back a few pages to see if you missed something.

And about that technology…

-Technology

Predicting the course of technology in the future is tough. It isn’t this tough, however, and once you have come up with some set of tech you have to also think about how it interacts with others. Larson falls down here.

Let’s first consider one of the key bits of tech throughout the series: the tapper.

Every human has one of these built into their fore arm, a little biomechanical computer with a touchscreen just below the skin. Basically an iPhone built in. Civilians have basic versions, but legionaries use theirs for communication, video recording, medical data transferal, scanning their brains, everything. It is cute social satire, having your smart phone become so central to life that it is literally embedded in your flesh, charged by your body, but…

Heavily armored soldiers who often fight in the vacuum of space use touch screens on their forearms to do everything.

What happens when they get a call and need to press “Accept”? Do they have a hole in their armor? Do they roll up the sleeve of their space suit? It actually took me a few books to realize, no, they never do that, because it is always right there and available, despite not having voice or direct mental controls; soldiers are always having to touch the screen to get it to do things. How the hell does that work?

And once you realize it, you start to see everywhere how insane that is, and how much the writing never addresses that.

Another issue with the technology is how little of it there is in the military. Not that they don’t have fancy stuff, but it is all infantry specific.

In the first book, Steel World, the author makes a point to explain the lack of heavy artillery, armored vehicles or aircraft by saying the contract was for protection of mining facilities against local insurgents. Please don’t bring big guns because we don’t want to level the place you are defending. This makes sense, and sets the stage for a very infantryman’s-day-out sort of story, where the grunts are going to have to solve all the problems because close air support just isn’t happening.

Then book two through nineteen happen and… where are the planes?

In his defense, perhaps he didn’t think there would be a book two, but there is now a serious problem, as there continues to be a total dearth of support for the infantry. There are literally three types of support weapons tech deployed throughout the series: 88’ light artillery (sort of a line of sight ray gun meets flame thrower), starfall artillery that drops very slow big bombs down in an area, and some fighter planes once or twice. Four types if you include the troop lifters with mega powerful anti-personnel lasers, landers that are described as too fragile and expensive to ever risk. Five types if you include the armored “dragon” walkers that they use in two books then never mention for the next ten or so before showing up again once or twice⁴.

Tanks? Nah.

Heavy transports with mounted pintle weapons? Nah.

Missiles or heavy laser carriers? Nope.

If you have ever played old editions of Warhammer 40k, like 2nd - 3rd, this might sound very familiar: basically our legions are Space Marines in heavy armor, carrying a round a powerful rifle, a few grenades, one or two heavy weapons (man portable missile launcher or plasma cannon) and… that’s it.

The author does try and write around this a bit, saying that every army basically deploys shield generators that make long range or airborne firepower kind of pointless, and so the infantry needs to get in close to bypass the shield front and gun people down. The trouble is that this is never a plot point. Never do the characters need to sneak in to blow up a shield generator so the air support can take out a position. Never do the characters need to protect their own shield generators. The plant-alien Wur don’t seem to have such shields at all, but using air power to just mow them down from 30,000 feet never comes up. Hell, I don’t even recall a single instance of the Legions using such a shield generator themselves, especially when they are fired to the surface via individual drop pods ala Starship Troopers, yet their enemies never deploy air strikes.

To me, this seems a little bit like coming up with a good way to get the infantry heavy feel you want in the first book, but then going into subsequent books without having a good way to keep that focus.

(In keeping with the 40k feel, it also seems like every engagement starts with a firefight at about 100 yards which very quickly degenerates into a hand to hand melee engagement. This is, in my opinion, also stupid but not entirely displeasing.)

-Other Tech

Tech in universe has some other immersion breaking problems as well. To start with just one example, let’s take teleportation technology.

Teleport tech is one of those cases where there is real advancement in the fictional world that is nice to see in a story that spans at least 50 years (although the time thing becomes an issue a bit.) There are three main types of teleportation devices.

The first is a personal teleportation harness, sort of a suit that can be programmed to turn you into hyperspace energy or something and send you to the relevant point, launching you across the galaxy at roughly 1 light year per second. (This rate is canon, and referred to multiple times.) Story wise this works pretty well, as it is limited by the charges on the harness (usually enough to get there and back, but maybe not if it was a long jump so you might need to recharge) and it can’t penetrate shields (unless the author forgets, or the target is inexplicably not shielded at a time when everyone and their brother has teleporter harnesses.) The primary issue with this tech is that unless the user is going somewhere with a link to the main human network, chances are pretty good they are going to get permed if they die and no one is around to see it and tell the other humans. Nice, risky, limited tech. Well done.

Secondly there is the casting tech, which is sort of a glowing ball of energy that launches the user off into the designated place. The downside is that the user can’t come back, and they can’t take anything with themm arriving naked (at least for a few books). The plus side is that for 10-20 minutes the techs operating the machine can keep essentially a mental link with the poor naked bastard sent across the universe, seeing through his eyes, speaking into his ears… somehow. This has the the fun limitation that the person sent can only really scout things out, and since they can’t get back they have to find a way to kill themselves within that 10-20 minute timeline or risk being permed as the link breaks and they are stuck somewhere out there with no record of their death. Again, kind of fun, very limited in a clear way. Good tech.

Lastly we have the gateway pylons. These are a little different: you need two gateways, one here and one where you want to go, but once set up any number of things can be put into one and will come out the other. These serve to make high speed travel for fair numbers of people or goods possible, so long as the end points are in control. As a narrative device they allow for quick travel between say a space ship on deployment and Earth, or between Earth and other planets, whether for our characters or whole armies. Given big enough gateways and enough power you can move damned near anything anywhere you can get to.

But that isn’t what causes the plot holes.

See, the other forms of teleportation just sort of move the person from place to place. Space magic, whatever. The gateways, however, specifically are said to disintegrate whatever goes into it only to rebuild it instantly on the other side. This is mentioned numerous times across the books. These things work like Star Trek transporters, breaking down what is getting moved before rebuilding it somewhere else, only in this case somewhere else can be pretty much infinitely far away⁵.

Can you guess where the plot holes come in?

That’s right, if you can disintegrate something here and make a perfect copy there, there is nothing stopping you from making multiple copies there, now or in the future. In Star Trek this takes the form of the replicator machines and holo-decks which allow Captain Picard to simply say “Computer, tea, Earl Grey, hot” and get a drink instantly⁶.

The world of Undying Mercenaries, however, wants to be resource constrained. Although in practice equipment is more or less infinitely available, as humans get eviscerated, reborn and reoutfitted over and over without much concern, there is at least a passing attempt to make equipment loss relevant. This is especially true in the case of “Rigellian armor” a special type of armor that is effectively impenetrable and extremely difficult to manufacture. Yet, of course it isn’t difficult to manufacture because they disintegrate and make a new suit every time they walk through one of those gates. Why not just crank out copies?

Now, a clever answer would be “The suits can’t be disintegrated, so they can’t get remade. Walking through a gateway in one of the suits just results in an empty suit of armor on the floor, and a naked legionary on the other side.” But no, it is simply never addressed.

The gates are poorly used in other cases as well. Troops are sometimes moved from the transport ship in orbit down to the surface in the large lifters, which of course sometimes get shot down, killing all aboard, losing their gear and the very expensive lifter in the process. Why not just send down a large number of much smaller ships, each with a gateway in back tied to the mother ship? Instead of 6-10 large lumbering lifters, each with a thousand or so men and their war gear inside, send down 100 little one man ships. When it arrives, just pop the trunk, turn on the gateway and let the troops walk out safely on the surface?

This kind of situation leaves the reader thinking “You didn’t really think this through, did you?” pulling you out of the story and killing much of the tension. Is a seemingly thoughtless lack of attention to a use now going to be heroically corrected later to save the day, or did seriously no one even realize this was a possibility? Well, probably the latter, so it is better if you just don’t pay attention or think too much about the world.

Much like how cell phones took forever to show up in television because 90% of the plots’ drama could be solved by a simple phone call, in universe users are forced to be stupid to make the story work.

In a universe where human beings are routinely killed and reprinted to exist again while being explicitly illegal to made duplicates of the people, it is amazing no one considered using their new mater printing technology to do the same with stuff.

Now, one might say “Wait, Doc! Those Rigelian armor suits are made of compressed matter! Super dense star stuff! Maybe it would just take so much energy to mass produce them through the gateway tech that it isn’t worth it!” To which I would reply “The energy needed is relative to the mass of the object, not the density. If the collapsed matter is light enough to be man portable without an exoskeleton (which is the case) it is light enough to be mass produced for reasonable energy expenditures.”

Yet even if we assume that is a fair defense, it doesn’t explain why other manufactured equipment isn’t mass produced. Why not crank out tons of artillery or heavy equipment or… oh yea, those dragons.

-Those dragons

This one gets its own section. So, as I mentioned earlier, much of the action is very infantry focused. There’s a problem, however: almost all of the enemies humanity faces are much bigger and stronger than humans, so much so that the typical rifles used are largely ineffective against them. Early on, book four or so, a solution seemed to arise in the form of an armored exoskeleton based vehicle called dragons. Think the power lifter gear from Aliens, or Dreadnaughts in 40k, or an up armored version of the mobile infantry armor in Starship Troopers. A big, bipedal fighting platform controlled by the pilot’s full body motions, with gun mounts, stompy feet, smashy clawed hands, and a tail, why not. Humans can now go toe to toe with big alien monsters in a way that is still focused on the martial prowess of the individual inside the suit. And as it turns out, our protagonist is amazing at piloting them! Great!

Then by book 6 or 7 they are never used again, because they are too expensive or something, and not once are they brought up again for something like 10 books. Effectively the entire technology gets put on a bus until a character brings out her own personal unit she’s apparently been saving in a closet for a few decades to wear around for a bit.

With the exception of the bus, that last sentence is perfectly accurate, by the way. *sigh*

Again, this seems to be one of those “whoops wrote myself into a corner because I didn’t plan” issues. Why doesn’t humanity employ more heavy weapons when damned near everything they fight is so much bigger than they are? Well, here, have some walking tanks to run around in... wait, never mind. My guess is that Larson, after two books involving the dragons, decided they took too much away from the infantry focus, much more than he realized, and so had to get rid of them. Personally, I thought it was fine; if you want more infantry focus you can have conflicts tight confined spaces where a 12 foot robot dragon can’t fit, or in civilian areas where mass destruction from armored vehicles isn’t alright. Or just not have the protagonist lead the cavalry, and only have them show up here and again. Just because you have combined arms capability doesn’t mean the infantry isn’t busy.

Unless of course next to nothing happens that your protagonist isn’t immediately involved in… so I guess that’s a problem. No artillery, air power, tanks or walking death robots, I guess. If our hero can’t carry it into battle on his shoulder, it can’t exist.

-Cultural Changes

Speaking of things that don’t exist… the culture of the future is kind of oddly bland. Those revival machines? Apparently only used by the Legions or the extremely rich and powerful. How often are the rich dying? What are the machines doing in the meantime? Wouldn’t it make more sense to revive anyone who could pay and just prioritize the rich and powerful?

Nope. Oh, but don’t worry, there are drugs that keep people youngish and relatively healthy, so McGill’s parents never actually die despite 50+ years elapsing. They don’t get names, but they aren’t going anywhere.

Any discussion about how strange it would be for a fair sized part of humanity to be immortal 20 somethings while the rest gets old and die?

Nah. Maybe we can mention that a few of the oligarchs ruling humanity are a few hundred years old. Why not.

What does… you know what? No. There is nothing relevant to talk about here, because there is no human culture in the books. Does that whole thing about losing memories matter? Only in the immediate story, and otherwise never comes up until the next time it is needed as a plot point. What about the possibility of bad copies getting made? Only happened in the past, never now.

Now, one renegade human does break the law and make a bajillion copies of himself to run around and do stuff, so that’s neat for a bit. Then it stops⁷.

Really there is nothing in particular that changes in humanity, or how they work in a future where we are minor slaves in a galaxy spanning empire, or as we become a bit of a player in that Empire. Disappointing.

Oh and at least two of their Roman themed legions are named after the Tuetoburg forest disaster: Varus and Tuetoburg. Who names two legions, the pride and source of financial stability of an entire species, after one of the greatest military disasters for the original legions? What does that say about future humanity? Nothing, apparently… why they are named such is never addressed.

-Characters

Ok, this is getting long and I am getting tired of writing it, so let us skip ahead a bit. The world building leaves a lot to be desired, sure, but worse, so much worse, is the character building.

First off, there are a handful of characters across 19 books. Maybe 30 total. From James’ poor, unnamed parents, to the six or so recruits he meets and spends the next 50 years with, to the officers he bickers with to a few big wigs and aliens, there just aren’t many characters. I might be being unfair, maybe there are 60 or even 80 named characters (if you include Mom and Dad as names) across 19 books, but that is still just 4 characters introduced per book on average, and the twenty or so in the first book are all still around in the last. This very limited cast gives the universe a very small feel, and worse, the characters themselves generally don’t have arcs. Natasha the smart tech girl recruit in book one is still the same smart tech girl recruit 18 books later, despite a somewhat horrific side story. Carlos is an annoying asshole in every book, and when he tries to leave the legion is immediately brought back, because we can’t have nice things.

Almost every character is the same flat, cardboard cut out of a character with the same flat motivations on the first page as the last page. Even when something really big does happen that should shape a character’s arc or place in the story it pretty quickly gets reverted back to the status quo, which is apparently God.

Which wouldn’t be so bad except for the next point…

Almost every character is a horrible person, roughly proportional to how much page time is dedicated to them.

Now, I am not talking about the casual violence… it does make a bit of sense that when people can be revived quickly and cheaply, murdering each other would be reduced to a misdemeanor (which it is in universe.) Life gets cheap enough and some cruelty and murder does make sense and people would just roll with it. That’s to be expected in an organization where everyone dies dozens of times while deployed.

What I am talking about is the fact that every major character seems really heavy on Dark Triad traits.

Now, I will defer to

Harrison Koehli

with regards to which exact traits each character has, and merely limit myself to describing how they act.

Remember how I said James McGill, our hero, was a bit like Harry Flashman without the self awareness? Here’s where that comes in. Flashman knows he is a scoundrel, a coward, bully, and a bit of a scumbag. McGill doesn’t seem so aware, at least of the fact he is a pathological liar and almost entirely indifferent to the emotional harm he causes those around him who he considers friends. At points he seems to lie reflexively for no reason and often in ways that are detrimental to him, yet neither he as our narrator or our author seem fully aware of this. He often is just casually cruel or abrasive to those around him as though he wants to pick fights. He knows his womanizing bothers his numerous long term fuck buddies, but eh, he can lie about it. Although McGill does occasionally show good moral motivations, over all it isn’t enough to really make him a likable character, someone you would like to meet. He comes across as incredibly self centered, callous, arrogant and childish. He is also a lot less charming than the author seems to think he is.

He is a paragon of human virtue, however, compared to his long term girlfriend Galina Turov. She makes her appearance as a sinister, cold hearted, rank grubbing, Machiavellian officer of Legion Varus, the hot villainess foil to our brave man McGill. She ends book 19 as a sinister, cold hearted, rank grubbing, Machiavellian officer of Earth’s Hegemony, the long term on again off afain girlfriend of our brave man McGill.

Now, I can totally understand having the protagonist and antagonist in a story develop a romantic interest in each other, especially if that romantic relationship results in the redemption, total or partial, of the antagonist. Or even if it is a love that is ultimately doomed by their too different personalities that drive them away again, forcing them to once again be at odds.

That can totally work.

What doesn’t work is the protagonist going out of his way to get in the pants of this vile little tart, going along with her often flat out evil schemes which as often as not result in her betraying him, or even humanity itself, and just kind of going along. To the author’s credit, McGill recognizes that she is a manipulative devil woman, but he can’t stay away because of how great her ass is. However, we poor readers do not have the benefit of looking at her ass, so we are left with 19 books of an absolutely terrible love interest with apparently zero redeeming features.

Now, not every character is as incredibly unlikable as Galina Turov, but many come close. Either they are just obnoxious, or disgusting psychopaths that never get a comeuppance, or even just die and go away; there aren’t many times the reader is excited to see someone. No character is a stand out, fun to read sort, nor particularly noble or admirable⁸. At best characters can rank as “eh, they’re alright.”

It’s a shame none of them die.

-Basic continuity

Here’s a question for you: if a man gets hit in the face with a missile, the explosive kind, and gets revived, naked and sticky, on a space ship thousands of miles away, will he still have the MacGuffin that was in his pocket pre-missile impact?

As it turns out, yes, he probably will.

This error happens early, and up until the last few books or until a very specific plot point requires it, often. Sure, it doesn’t matter if all our man McGill has with him is bog standard kit when he dies horribly; he can just revive and get the same kit and trot back out. However, starting with book 3 or so there is a particular item that is nearly one of a kind that he has with him, and indeed seems to continually have with him no matter where or how he dies.

Amusingly, if you are a gamer, it might take you a little while to notice this. It didn’t occur to me right away, because hey, if you die in Call of Duty or whatever you respawn with all the crap in your inventory that you had before. You don’t have to run around to find your dead body and go through your own pockets. Seems natural.

Of course in the universe of Undying Mercenaries that is exactly what you have to do, because you aren’t “respawned” you are just reprinted in the revival machine with your memories put in. That smoking corpse of yours that is now spread evenly over an acre or so still has all the stuff that was in your pockets with it. Or at least the fragments thereof.

So when McGill gets nuked on the surface of an asteroid mining facility, no, I do not believe he is getting his fancy armor or his magic space key back, even if you said someone collected all the gear from the site. I really don’t believe he retains that key when he dies on a planet or something and then never goes back there.

I mean, I get it, keeping track of stuff and where it is is hard. This is why we have character sheets when playing D&D, and even then it is hard to keep track. But when the core of your story involves killing someone at Point A and reviving them by building a new naked body at Point B, and this happens all the time, you should be prepared to keep track of an important item or two and not just assume it is wherever it needs to be.

Conclusion

The Undying Mercenaries series is a plot hole laden story about unlikable characters set in a universe that doesn’t really make any sense when you think about it, even strictly from the standpoint of its own internal logic.

That said, I still read all 19 books straight through in two months.

For all its flaws, and there are many, it is still a pretty fun read, with some interesting situations, alien worlds, and some pretty clever events. It definitely is not the worst thing I have read, even if it lacks the quality of say Old Man’s War, much less Heinlein’s work, or the charm of a Flashman.

In fact, I would say if you haven’t read everything Heinlein has ever written (or at least Starship Troopers, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and Glory Road), or the Flashman series by George Macdonald Fraser, read those first. (Especially Flashman, it’s great fun.) Then maybe read Old Man’s War.

When you are finished with those, however, and you need something light to read while stuck on a plane or while you are half brain dead and exhausted from work, Undying Mercenaries is probably worth your time so long as you aren’t paying full price for it. It is pretty good original pulp sci-fi. Just don’t feel like you need to finish all 19 books. If you are hoping it gets better, well, I can tell you it doesn’t. Arguably it gets a little worse over time.

…..

I also want to offer this closing thought:

In a way, Undying Mercenaries is an inspirational series. This guy wrote 19 of these books, and a handful of other series I didn’t look at, and got them published. Now, I don’t know what having 19+ books on Amazon Unlimited pays, but look at it this way: his books, 19 of which I just described, got published and people bought them.

Why not yours?

---

Thanks for sticking through this guys!

1. Which… well I will get to the negative points here in a bit. McGill is aware that he is a sex hound and a liar, but…

2. Although it turns out this can be taken too far… and it is.

3. Yes, not only are the books themselves all named “Steel World”, “Dust World”, “Tech World” etc., the characters themselves all refer to the planets in universe using those appellations.

4. Oh, boyo, I’ll get to those.

5. In this universe faster than light communication is a thing, although it is apparently expensive and rare to use for chatting. This has just the right amount of hand wavery to not be a problem, and presumably the gateways use this method to tell the gateways on the other side what to build.

6. I don’t know what happens if he forgets to specify “tea” in that command line, but I would watch the episode where we find out.

7. Fans of the Endless Space video games will be thinking “It is the birth of Horatio, the most beautiful being in the galaxy!” Alas… no. Just a recurring villain, a really sneaky trader type, named Claver. Say that out loud. Yea… a little on the nose.

8. Except possibly for smart tech girl, but she is largely out of the story about 5 books in.