Redliners [Mass Market Paperback]

David Drake (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1997

The troops of Strike Force Company C41 were given a final mission: guard a colony sent to a hell planet. When the mission went horribly wrong, they found their lives on the line as never before.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Drake returns with great success to the pattern of his best military sf novels. After a near-suicidal operation, an elite company of recon troops has been "redlined" --declared pyschologically unfit. A complex and somewhat improbable experiment is mounted to save them: they will escort a column of civilians across an intensely hostile world to a final confrontation at an alien biological warfare center. This scenario proves the foundation of an excellent book, full of Drake's usual superb action scenes and ingenious weapons and menaces. Drake also does considerably better by his characters, both civil and military (including the women): even one of his stock-in-trade personae, the guilt-obsessed trooper, takes on new life under the name of Caius Blohm. This is, far and away, the prolific Drake's best book since The Sharp End (1993). Roland Green --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Baen (June 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671877895
• ISBN-13: 978-0671877897
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #343,500 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #10 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Authors, A-Z > ( D ) > Drake, David

More About the Author

The Army took David Drake from Duke Law School and sent him on a motorized tour of Viet Nam and Cambodia with the 11th Cav, the Blackhorse. He learned new skills, saw interesting sights, and met exotic people who hadn't run fast enough to get away.

Dave returned to become Chapel Hill's Assistant Town Attorney and to try to put his life back together through fiction making sense of his Army experiences.

Dave describes war from where he saw it: the loader's hatch of a tank in Cambodia. His military experience, combined with his formal education in history and Latin, has made him one of the foremost writers of realistic action SF and fantasy. His bestselling Hammer's Slammers series is credited with creating the genre of modern Military SF. He often wishes he had a less interesting background.

Dave lives with his family in rural North Carolina.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Redliners, good action book., April 2, 2000

By 

dave k - See all my reviews

This review is from: Redliners (Mass Market Paperback)

Redliners by David Drake Redline is an enjoyable book by David Drake. It is cover to cover action but has some space for plot and character development. There is more profanity than is usual for Drake but there is more depth to the characters. Redline is a widely used word, to a mechanic it means pushing a machine past its design tolerances. To an accountant it describes a situation where risk likely exceeds gain. To Rudyard Kipling it meant the thin red line of redcoated soldiers protecting the British Empire. In David Drake's book it means all these things and one thing more, it refers to a redline across a service record when the stress of battle makes the soldier dangerous to all around him. Redliners is an interesting science fiction book. Like many of Drakes books the main characters are professional soldiers doing their job. The action is exciting and the emotional reactions believable. The concept of bureaucratic injustice or personal injustice is balanced against the pragmatic of "it was necessary". The book starts with a battle against an alien enemy the Kalendru. The human soldiers are company C41, spec-ops called strikers, who invade a space port on a colony to disable its C&C as a prelude to full invasion. Drake breaks the plot into several lines and switches between each showing significant events from several viewpoints. This simulates the chaos of war and builds suspense, although it does make the main plot hard to follow at times. Later, when C41 guards a colony sent to a hell planet, the same actions are taken as in the initial invasion, not against a enemy alien, but toward a brutally hostile environment. The similarities help underscore the emotional battles the strikers have with the way they now behave and the way normal folk act. Lethal brute force verses patient social discourse. The civilian colonists are fearful of the strikers at first but eventually realize that on the colony world the striker's attitudes are the difference between life and death. The colonist's gratitude is the first indication the strikers have that what they do matters and this helps redeem many of them.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Action-filled novel with veterans of war as the focus, July 4, 1998

By 

Kenneth R. Bridges "Siddhas" (Thousand Oaks, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Redliners (Hardcover)

Redliners starts with riveting action that continues to the last page. The characters have depth that is often missing from novels whose primary focus is the effect of war on the human spirit. Only in the last two chapters does the overarching plot become clear. Drake could have dropped a few hints along the way to spice the imagination. The novel could be easily translated into a screenplay, and likely would do well at the box office.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An amazing portrait of the Warrior., December 23, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Redliners (Mass Market Paperback)

As a long time Drake fan, and a career soldier, I was amazed and moved by this book. Redliners shows the effects of combat on the combatants, and includes the distaste felt by the civilians for those same combatants. I can relate to all the attitudes expressed. The characters are extremely well-written, and show a depth that is hard to find in a "War" book. I feel that this should be a required read in a Government, or Social Studies class. Bless you, David Drake.