November 2023 Book Club: Mutineers' Moon (Dahak, #1) by David Weber

  

My rating: 2.5 of 5 stars

Category: Adult
Genre: Sci-fi
Content: Strong language, see review below

 

For Lt. Commander Colin Maclntyre, it began as a routine training flight over the Moon. For Dahak, a self-aware Imperial battleship, it began millennia ago when that powerful artificial intelligence underwent a mutiny in the face of the enemy. The mutiny was never resolved--Dahak was forced to maroon not just the mutineers but the entire crew on prehistoric Earth.
Dahak has been helplessly waiting as the descendants of the loyal crew regressed while the mutineers maintained control of technology that kept them alive as the millennia passed. But now Dahak's sensors indicate that the enemy that devastated the Imperium so long ago has returned--and Earth is in their path. For the sake of the planet, Dahak must mobilize its defenses. And that it cannot do until the mutineers are put down. So Dahak has picked Colin Maclntyre to be its new captain. Now Maclntyre must mobilize humanity to destroy the mutineers once and for all--or Earth will become a cinder in the path of galactic conquest.

 

This book started out pretty enjoyable. I liked the main character and the A.I. ship Dahak was interesting. I was looking forward to some space adventure, but it eventually went a little off track from what I thought it was going to be, and turned into more of a spy-type book with political espionage. My husband said it turned into a Tom Clancy-like book. Also, right off the bat there are some pretty heavy deaths, with a whole family being found murdered. There wasn't too much detail about it though, which helped. 

I think I would have enjoyed the second half of the book a lot more if there had not been so many points of view. While listening to the audio, it was hard to keep everyone straight, and there was no warning that the book was moving onto another character's point of view. No pause, no change in tone of voice, no nothing. I eventually gave up trying to keep up with who was who. There's also a bit of a romance, or the beginnings of one, thrown in there that was very predictable and lackluster.

**A few Minor SPOILERS here** As we discussed this book during our book club meeting, we realized that different elements of this book reminded us of different movies. In the first part of the book the main character gets changed into something of a cyborg, and it reminded me a lot of wolverine. Then there is Dahak, and Dahak got compared to the deathstar from Star Wars. In fact one of our book club members compared several things in the book to Star Wars. Another, said she got some Star Trek vibes from the book, and I thought of Stargate while I was reading it. The Stargate elements were the ancient people who inhabited the bodies of humans, just in a different way from Stargate. **End of Spoilers**

 

A couple of people have already gone on to read the second book in the trilogy and said it was more like what we were expecting the first book to be like and suggested we read the next book. While I thought the book was ok, I didn't really love it enough to keep reading, even if book two might be better.

For refreshments we had Moon Pies and space rocket shaped sandwiches. FYI, these are not my photos. I stupidly forgot to take photos again this month, but I wanted to show you what the Moon Pies and sandwiches looked like that we made. These are very close to our sandwiches that we used a cookie cutter to make.