The Janitors of the Post-Apocalypse series, Book 1
Jim C. Hines
DAW
Fiction, Humor/Sci-Fi
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: When the Krakau came to Earth, humanity's dream of first contact finally came true. Unfortunately, a mutant virus had turned the populace into cannibalistic, nearly-indestructible zombies before then. But the Krakau managed to find a cure of sorts; though the restored humans aren't quite what they used to be, intellectually or otherwise, they can at least think and learn and are far less likely to snack on superior officers. Under the protection of the Krakau-led Alliance, they form the Earth Mercenary Corps, becoming galactic shock troops protecting the peace of countless worlds and species. Even among mercenaries, though, not every job requires a gun...
Lieutenant Marion "Mops" Adamopoulos leads a crew of janitors as head of Shipboard Hygiene and Sanitation aboard the EMCS Pufferfish. It's a dirty job, but life's a dirty business, and a pipe leak or blocked sewage line in the wrong place can mess up a spaceship just as easily as an enemy weapon. She never actually thought she'd have to fight for her life, let alone take command. But when an attack by hostile Prodryans takes out the Krakau commanders and reverts the rest of the human crew to their zombie native state, only her team - sealed in personal air hoods for a clean-up job - is spared. Now four human janitors and one low-ranking Glacidae technician may be the only ones standing between the Alliance and a devastating new bioweapon that could forever alter the galactic balance of power.
REVIEW: With faint echoes of the classic Britcom Red Dwarf (where a Liverpudlian loser becomes the last human alive aboard a derelict mining vessel three million years in the future) and Quark (a short-lived Mel Brooks comedy about a spacegoing garbage scow), Terminal Alliance takes a cast of misfit characters and turns them into improbable heroes. The crew can be irritatingly bumbling at times as they struggle to figure out how to even use their ship ("helped" by the annoying computer assistant program Puffy, in a joke for those of us who endured Clippy's antics in older versions of Word.) These antics can get old, persisting long past the point had been made about how woefully unprepared (and undertrained) they are even as it tends to reduce character depth to cartoonish shallowness at times, but they manage to come together and figure things out, and the tale moves well enough despite the sidetracks into goofiness. Beneath the light exterior, the plot has some depth and heft to it: from their initial goal of mere survival against feral crewmates, Marion and the others find themselves forced to question the very nature of the Krakau Alliance and the zombie plague itself (some aspects of which were easy to guess early on, but others being decently clever twists, especially in a genre that still tends to somewhat monolithic alien races.) While it sometimes was a little silly for my tastes, Terminal Alliance turns out to be an enjoyable, action-filled diversion, a nice change of pace in a genre that can take itself too seriously.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Galaxy Quest (Terry Bisson) - My Review
Old Man's War (John Scalzi) - My Review
Red Dwarf: The Complete Collection
- Amazon DVD link
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