Mutineers' Moon
Dahak #1

David Weber

Riverdale: Baen, 1991. ISBN: 0-671-72085-6. Pp. 315

Review © 2007 Branislav L. Slantchev

Before Weber hit it big with Honor Harrington, there was Colin MacIntyre, a hot-shot NASA pilot whose training flight over the Moon... well, over what we think is the Moon but what in fact is Dahak, a humongous battleship of the Fourth Imperium that had stood a silent watch over the Earth for over 50,000 years. Yes, you read that right: our moon is actually a warship. The original moon was apparently destroyed when this impostor replaced it (although we are never really told just what sort of havoc an object with such mass would have on this planet before it got rid of the old Moon). It's not exactly clear what business the Imperium has building these monsters but at any rate, it is here and it is self-aware.

Which means, of course, it's probably getting lonely after all these thousands of years. But it's actually worse, for Dahak is on a mission from god (well, okay, on a mission from his original Captain whose last orders could be treated as the word of god for all practical purposes as far as the ship is concerned). So even though it's not the case that "in the beginning was the Word," it most surely appears that in the end it will be. For the instructions to Dahak are quite clear: it is to orbit around Earth until it destroys every last one of the mutineers that attempted to take it over but failed. Since these guys fled to Earth, Dahak must now just wait for them to surface so it can kill them.

Simple? No? Weber then takes us on an increasingly unbelievable journey where he tries to weave hare-brained conspiracy theories that link world governments, Islamic terrorists, and assorted warmongers to these mutineers who are led be a certifiable nutcase by the name Anu, which I am guessing is short for Anubis given the blatant references to Egyptian religion elsewhere in the book. Basically, the bad guys come out of kryo every century or so to wreak havoc and steal some fresh bodies, but other than that they seem content just biding their time beneath the ice of Antarctica (thank god Weber didn't involve Atlantis in this but he came close). This and battle a splinter mutineer group whose sole purpose in this is to provide the muscle for MacIntyre, making his defeat of the bad guys a bit less unbelievable... as in Earth not resting on the back of an elephant resting on the back of a tortoise but on turtles all the way down.

Fundamentally nothing more than a brain candy, this first entry in the Dahak Trilogy fails on just about every level. It's an easy read but the characters are just flat and uninteresting. The one glimmer of hope dies very soon during an attack on a house, and it's all downhill from there. The love-story between MacIntyre and Jiltanith (with her exceedingly annoying tendency to speak what the Cliff's Notes tell us was Shakespearean English) is juvenile with all that hatred getting turned into passion. There are several interesting but underdeveloped characters like MacMahan: Weber could have explored the moral ramifications of the plan the good guys implement instead of just dismissing them with a short note about them thinking about those. Or maybe Weber truly believes in that memorable sentiment echoed in Verhoeven's Starship Troopers: "We're in it for the species, boys and girls," so the survival imperative trumps any sort of artificial morality. Or does it? If we survive in that way, what are we going to be?

The novel is pretty weak even in the military department where Weber usually excels. The plan of the counter-mutineer mutineers reeks of implausible logic, especially because its success depends entirely on the enemy drawing appropriate conclusions (which he nearly did not and would not have had his staff been less afraid of him). Maybe Dean Acheson was right when he noted that "military recommendations are usually premised upon the meticulous statement of assumptions that as often as not are quite contrary to the facts and yet control the conclusions." Of course, with Weber playing God in his own novel, none of these military plans are subject to the classic Clausewitzian friction that would have undone them all in real life.

The final gripe about this novel is that there's just way too much going on for a such a simple and short work. The galaxy-spanning Fourth Imperium, the relentless Shiva of an enemy in the Achuultani, all the changes that earthlings must adapt to. It's all too much and it happens in too short of a time. In fact, it's as if the main confrontation is going to be between whatever remains of the Imperium (probably nothing) and the other aliens, so this action on Earth is merely a sideshow, a stepping-stone toward the larger stage. Since Earth would have no chance against the Achuultani unless the mutineers are defeated, their end is foreordained by the existence of two other novels after this one. Ruins the suspense a bit, I would say.

August 18, 2007