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The Ninth Circle by R.M. Meluch

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


Right, it's been a while, so as a refresher, this is the military scifi series where the Roman Empire went underground for a few thousand years, only to re-emerge in the space age and set up a whole new empire in opposition to the U.S. in space, and then a lot of homoerotic things happened. Got that? Good.

I stress-read the first few books in this series and enjoyed the hell out of them. You know, where you make a Cartesian plane with good/bad on one axis and enjoyable/not enjoyable on the other – this series was waaaay deep in the bad/enjoyed quadrant. But we've been through a few twists and turns, killed off some major characters, sent others off to get married to a random, and it turns out the enjoyable was coming from a very specific scenario, and when you erase that, well.

What you're left with is Meluch's politics (pro-military to the point of jingoism), her series-long disdain for civilian peacekeeping forces turned up to eleven, and this really awful moment where I realized she's genuinely interested in a bunch of teenaged boys who deliberately set out to become spree killers because daddy didn't love one of them enough (no, for real, that's his actual reason). There's also a lot of frankly weird back-and-forth about how the right-thinking people can recognize a hostile species on sight (it's . . . genetic? Apparently? Evil aliens just look . . . wrong?) but those stupid scientists, they want to talk to the ugly aliens before starting a shooting war and don't recognize the superiority of the cute aliens, what bullshit.

Blech. Someone let me know if she resurrects the bio-engineered vicious Roman genius. Otherwise, I'm out.




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