Another great series in the offing for Doug Dandridge.

Having just finished re-reading one of his other series: Exodus Empires at War, my expectations for Contact were very high indeed.

Dandridge delivered. Period. He is a superlative world-builder, with the kind of in-depth milleu building that wouldn't be out of place in any well-known fantasy novel. The story shows a fresh take on the basic technologies along with some really creative ideas about limited strategic resources.
On top of that, the story showcases that fact that the guy can tell a damn good story at the end of the day. He does a good job of fleshing out the characters and the backstory to give it that pull to drag the reader into the story. Foregoing any spoilery-type information, this is a great first contact scenario in a completely different setting than his other big series: fans of that will not be disappointed, and fans in general of mil sci-fi and space opera with character will not regret time spent in this book.
Looking forward to the next installment. ( )

I first read this as a teenager, and it didn’t hold up well on a re-read: there are some good ideas but the world building tried to be more than the author could pull off, which lasted through the remainder of the trilogy. It tries to be set outside the US, which was a neat idea but the characters and culture act and talk like late Cold War Americans and Christianity is the only religion which is important enough to impact the plot.

Content warning: as was unfortunately common in that generation, one of the female characters is largely defined by a brutal rape described in unnecessary detail and continues to be in the plot mostly for male, and thus more important, characters to want to have sex with her. ( )

Some interesting ideas but sadly not captured well in the book - it doesn't take off as a book until the space rocket takes off. Inoffensive but I can't claim to have got much out of it. June 2020. ( )

Kube-McDowell, Michael P. Emprise. The Trigon Disunity. Berkley, 1985.
This first volume of the Trigon Disunity series was a nominee for the Philip K. Dick Award, and one can see why. It deals in the way Dick often did with issues of surveillance and bureaucratic skullduggery. During an almost apocalyptic planetary environmental and economic collapse, we are somehow able to martial the resources to travel out several years to meet an incoming alien starship that has pinged us. The story of getting ready to launch is slow, but once the encounter takes place the drama becomes intense as the political and religious divisions among the crew threaten to upset all the apple carts. There is a scientist who is interested in seeing what evolution has wrought, a militarist who is interested in deciding whether to attack, defend, or surrender, a religious zealot who thinks the aliens will be messengers from God. And there is our protagonist, who has to decide how to mediate the disputes and decide what to do when the aliens turn out to be surprising in many ways. ( )

I don’t remember where and when I bought this trilogy, but I suspect it wasn’t long after they were published (these Legend editions were all published in 1988). I think it may have been at a convention, given that the third book, Empery, has “£1” pencilled inside the cover. Anyway, I’m pretty sure they went into storage when my parents returned to the Middle East in the early 1990s, and I didn’t see them again until I moved into my current address in 2004. So I’ve had them for around twenty-eight years, and they’ve sat on my book-shelves here for fourteen years before I’ve finally got around to reading them. And… Emprise was Kube-McDowell’s debut novel. And so too for the sequels, Enigma (below) and Emprey. I’ve read other novels by Kube-McDowell – The Quiet Pools (1990) and Exile (1992) – but Emprise is not very good. It opens with a history lesson, which is never a good sign. Apparently, in the 1980s a secret group of scientists discovered a way to render all fission weapons inert. And they used it. This led to a series of short wars, and a total backlash against science. Both of which we’ve managed during the past 30 years anyway, without rendering nuclear weapons useless. In a regressive US, a lone secret radio astronomer discovers a signal. From a spacecraft approaching the Earth at near light-speed. He passes the news onto a British colleague… and within a few short years, there’s an international organisation, led by the prime minister of India, set up to build a spacecraft to meet the alien before it gets too close to the Solar system. When news of the alien breaks, it leads to a Church of the Second Coming, which believes the spacecraft contains angels. Anyway, the Earth spacecraft gets built and intercepts the alien… And its crew are human. From a colony apparently founded from Earth. By a technological civilisation which was wiped out by the last Ice Age. Publishing has changed in the thirty-plus years since Emprise was published, and debut novels these days are way ore polished than this one. A lot of the story is massively Americocentric, despitr not being set in the US. That church, for example: it becomes so powerful, it threatens to shut down the building of the spacecraft. There is no mention of any other religion. Indeed, the Indian PM’s religion is never actually named. If I had had all three books on my bookshelves, and felt slightly guilty for owning them so long without reading them, I doubt I’d have bothered with the sequels. Avoid. ( )