Bookworm Speaks: Mecha Corps

Bookworm Speaks!

Mecha Corps: A Novel of the Iron Wars

by Brett Patton

Acquired: Barnes and Nobel Booksellers

Series: Armor Wars

Mass Market Paperback: 336 Pages

Publisher: Roc

Language: English

****

The Story: Matt Lowell is in hell-and there's no place he'd rather be. At a training camp on the backwater planet of Earth, he and his fellow cadets are learning to ride Mechas: biomechanicals sporting both incredible grace and devastating firepower. Their ultimate aim is to combat the pirates of the Corsair Confederacy, but before they survive a battle, they have to survive their training.

Because every time Lowell and his comrades "plug in" to their Mechas, their minds are slowly being twisted and broken by an unseen power that is neither man...nor machine.

The Review: This book has been described as Robert A. Heinlein meets Neon Genesis Evangelion and Bookworm has to agree with that assessment. This book starts off in a very promising military sci-fi action in the vein of Starship Troopers and other classical fiction. 

A little bit of backstory: Evangelion is an Japanese animation or anime/manga that is considered by many to a groundbreaking series that deconstructs a lot of the Mech tropes that have long been a mainstay of anime. However, Evangelion has been described as a very confusing franchise and this book falls into the same trap while trying to do something different. 

The influence of anime very high both in the mech sections as well as a bit of characterization. The mechs are not like what one would expect in a westernized novel, especially one about the military.  They are technological but there is a great deal of organic matter. It is frequently remarked that the mechs feel alive. This is a dead ringer for several influential anime. 

Matt is good character but he is good in the way  Johnnie Rico is in Starship Troopers, in that he is more of an audience surrogate. We see his backstory and it is an interesting one, he motivation being revenge for the death of his father. 

One of the positives of the character though is how there is a love triangle and a tentative romance between Matt and the female lead, but they do not end up in a bed together. Bookworm was expecting them to consummate almost through the entire final third. The fact that they didn’t is a welcome break from expectations. It is good to break expectations because ending up in bed is almost a mainstay of popular fiction. Breaking cliches is great way to surprise the reader. 

As one can see though, that is not enough to salvage the third act, as Bookworm can’t remember exactly the female lead’s name. Several other characters fall through the gaps as well. 

There are great deal of gaps when recalling this book, which is not a good sign on the quality of the text. Some parts work well but they make the flaws look even worse by contrast. 

The setting is too good. Bookworm remembers passages about Earth but very few about the characters. It makes sense that Earth would become a backwater in the future. Everyone who matters has rocketed off to the shiny new colonies, leaving the homeworld behind. 

Final Verdict: This series has a lot of potential and the author does deserve credit for trying to pay homage to two very influential areas of sci-fi, all the while blending them into something unique. The story is what pulls the thing through but unfortunately the execution falls flat while trying to combine the wrong things and ends up a bit of a mess. 

Will Bookworm read the next volumes in the series? Perhaps one day, probably not soon.  

Three out of Five Stars

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