Dispossessed in the battle of Tukayyid, former Com Guard Soldier Jeremiah Rose wants nothing more than to strike back at the Clans who destroyed his 'Mech and his career. Dreams of swift vengeance turn to nightmares when every effort he makes to rejoin the fight to protect the citizens of the Inner Sphere is rejected.
Forced to win a new BattleMech by fighting on the game world of Solaris VII, Rose recruits other soldiers from the arenas to create a new mercenary unit and take his grudge back to the invaders.
Unfortunately, Rose is long on battle experience and desperately short on business skill. Turning a band of mismatched MechWarriors into an elite fighting unit becomes harder than he imagined when Rose is forced to fight his fellow MechWarriors in order to fight the Clans.
This really isn’t a Solaris novel, as the title suggests. There are only a couple chapters on Solaris, the rest is a bog-standard “new mercenary company” story. A dispossessed Mechwarrior gets some Mechs and some pilots together, they find a bad contract and they somehow make it through.
The novel is very much written as an intro to BattleTech, and it does that work competently. However, the characters are kind of bland and nothing important to the universe happens. If you’re going through old BT novels, I’d recommend skipping this one.
This was my first Battletech novel back in the 90s (when I read it in German as "Stahlgladiatoren"). As I recently got into the franchise again I decided to reread it, this time in English. And it is definitely a breezy read. Hardly a good one, but at least the action keeps coming, even if some of the plot points feel a bit sus. We encounter Jeremiah Rose, who lost his Battlemech but still wants to fight the Clans who invaded the Inner Sphere and were stopped at the Battle of Tukayyid. So he goes to his home planet and tries to get support there, only to be frozen out by his own father. He does manage to recruit both his sister and a cousin, then goes to the arena planet Solaris VII to somehow get a Battlemech for himself. After a surprisingly short time there he has both mechs …
This was my first Battletech novel back in the 90s (when I read it in German as "Stahlgladiatoren"). As I recently got into the franchise again I decided to reread it, this time in English. And it is definitely a breezy read. Hardly a good one, but at least the action keeps coming, even if some of the plot points feel a bit sus. We encounter Jeremiah Rose, who lost his Battlemech but still wants to fight the Clans who invaded the Inner Sphere and were stopped at the Battle of Tukayyid. So he goes to his home planet and tries to get support there, only to be frozen out by his own father. He does manage to recruit both his sister and a cousin, then goes to the arena planet Solaris VII to somehow get a Battlemech for himself. After a surprisingly short time there he has both mechs and companions, goes to a mercenary planet, then the company is hired to be stationed on some backwater planet where nobody even believes the Clans would ever invade.
The Clans DO in fact invade and we follow along as our rag-tag band of misfits fight against the meager Clan Invasion force.
Things keep happening in this book one after another, and yet it feels like there is not actually that much of a plot. In a way it feels like a picaresque, a perfect little introduction into the setting, but with no actual substance to it. That doesn't mean it is necessarily bad, but it certainly isn't really good either. Rose keeps stumbling from scene to scene, and stuff just keeps falling into his lap for no good reason. Rose is an idiot. He is shrewd, but his priorities are out of whack, and one could not believe people would follow a man like this, and yet lots of them do. Which I guess fits with how mechwarriors in general are presented in the franchise.
One of the main issues I have with it is how we as an audience are promised one thing (gladiatorial battles with giant robots) on the cover, while in the book these get the short shrift. Rose spends a minuscule amount of time on Solaris VII, fights in a single non-standard match, spends part of the chapters set on the world recounting the Battle of Tukayyid (clearly the author just threw in another story he had written as filler) and then buggers off never to be a gladiator again. There's something to be said about keeping promises to the reader, and this is not it.
