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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Good Prequel, January 5, 2006
"Musashi Flex" by Steve Perry is another great offering for those who have enjoyed the Matadore series. This is a fast paced book, as all of Perry's Matodore books have been. Perry manages to insert his readers into a far distant future, but still make them feel at home.
Many of the technologies that were at first "cutting edge" when Perry began his series with "The Man Who Never Missed", are in production and common place today. To me, this points out the visionary quality that writers like Steve Perry and others in the SciFi genre have. They seem to be road maps for what is to come.
"The Musashi Flex" focuses primarily on the semi-illegal fight game going on among the many Confed planets. The Flex is kind of a cross between NHB martial arts with a taste of the old west gunfighters. The Flex players move from planet to planet essentially dueling each other for the title of Primero...the number one fighter. This little book has all the elements of the current state of sports, with illegal performance drug use and constantly imroving training technique and fighting technique. However, Perry manages to describe fairly accurately the movement of these competitors from fighter to Spiritual warrior.
For those that have enjoyed this series, this book is also the origin of the 97 Steps martial art featured in all the Matador novels as well as showing the origin of the rebellion against the Confed.
A good read from Steve Perry. Hopefully, he will delve further into this series and continue to flesh out his fascinating view of the future.
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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Collision of Champions, February 1, 2006
Lazlo Mourn is ranked in the Top Twenty of the Musashi Flex, a martial arts gladiatoral game that spans dozens of worlds in the Comfederation. Ellis Shaw, one of the wealthiest men in the ComFed, has just came up with a new drug that enhances a person's metabolism making him -- for a short while at a time -- one of the fastest beings in several worlds. These two men are fated to meet in the top rung of the Flex. But Lazlo Mourn, once a semi-burned out fighter who had reached the peak of his game, has just received an enlightment and is on a self-fulfilling journey to perfect the craft he's given his entire life to. Meanwhile, Shaw's drug invention is the object of a ComFed spy plot and could ultimately be his downfall.
Steve Perry returns to his Matador universe with this entry. Author of THE 97th STEP, THE ALBINO KNIFE, novels in the ALIENS series as well as STAR WARS, Perry also writes novels in Tom Clancy's bestselling Net Force series.
Perry has written a lean, mean book filled with action and character. It's not really deep enough to stay with a reader long after the final page is turned, but there are nuggets of pure gold within it. The character of Lazlor Mourn is real and honest, and Ellis Shaw comes across as a complex and complicated antagonist. In between the takes on marital arts and the psychology of fighting lie intriguing bits of a future world Perry has been writing about for twenty years. The layers and textures of the novel delight and provide glimpses of how the future may turn out. The reader moves swiftly through the action, and through the lives of Mourn and Shaw as each in turn has to hustle and evade the things that would hamper them from finding out who is best.
For good, old-fashioned action science fiction, a reader would have to look far and wide to find someone who equals Steve Perry's futuristic martial arts books. People who've enjoyed Gordon Dickson's Dorsai novels of John Ringo's military SF will probably enjoy this novel. Buckle in and be prepared to be totally entranced with the rapid-fire action and dialogue.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Flexing the muscles of the Matadora universe, January 4, 2006
This book is great for any and all fans of the Matadora series.
Taking place years before any of the existing books, this helps to flesh out the Confed and history that becomes important later on in the series.
Fast paced as these books generally are, this is a good addition with some good surprises.
I, for one, am hoping for more books to flesh out this universe even more or to link the story in this book to the rest of the books with more of Perry's creative storytelling.
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