The Riss Series books 1 to 3.
By C.R. Daems.
My rating ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2 out of 5 stars.
Blurb from book 1:
A young girl dreams of seeing the stars and meeting aliens. Her chance comes in the form of a project offering a college education, commissioning in the SAS Fleet, and a partnership with an alien. She successfully qualifies and wins one of the coveted ten positions. Of course everything comes with a price—the alien is a parasite that inhabits the body and mind, and is there for life. Is it a dream or nightmare come true—or maybe both?
I have to say that I quite enjoyed reading these three books, The Riss Gamble, The Riss Proposal and The Riss Survival.
The underlying premise of the story, the Riss who wants to go into space with the help of the humans and invades the bodies of a set of human volunteers, is a bit weird and maybe not that plausible but it is really just a pretext to build a story from so it is not a big deal.
The books follows our main protagonist as she enlists to be part of the program, bonds with her alien, trains to become a navy officer and finally becomes one. During this journey she has to fight prejudice from fellow naval officers, incompetence and, of course bad guys. Both domestic and external bad guys.
I like the main protagonist and her Riss symbiont. I do not understand why the books insist on referring to the Riss as parasites? That’s just bullshit. They are symbionts. Nadya are quite competent, thinks out of the box and does not hesitate when push comes to shove. There are several other likable, or at least competent, characters in the books, even at the Admiral level.
If we ignore this “Riss wants to go to space” nonsense the story is a good one. It is decently paced with plenty of adventure, advancement and action. The bad guys mostly gets the short end of the stick and we usually get to be there for that part. Not like in too many books where you have to suffer through a long build up getting to really hate the bad guy and then, wham, in a few sentences we are just told that he was arrested or fired or some stupid shit like that.
I rate these three books at 3 1/2 star with the first and third book being 4 stars and the middle one being a 3 star one. Why 3 stars for the middle one?
Well, that is because this theme in all of the books where there is a shitload of prejudice against these aliens and especially the Riss-humans. Everywhere Nadya goes she is not only resented but sabotaged in the most blatant and criminal ways. Seriously, almost all the navy personnel behaves in a way that is criminally unprofessional. In the first book it was acceptable. There was a lot of advancements and a lot of the asshats got what they deserved.
However, when the second book just continued the same way and the same, disproven, lies just got repeated by said asshats and Nadya’s accomplishments got swiped under the rug or flat out denied it was just too much. Like listening to the far left mainstream media repeating the same debunked bullshit over and over again.
Another thing that irks me a bit is the nonsense that are mentioned every so often that the Riss have no ranks but everyone is “the same” and just doing what is needed in every situation. This is just idealistic pseudo-socialist nonsense that have been proven not to work over and over again.
Overall however, I quite liked these books. They are fun reading with a main protagonist a little bit in the spirit of Harrington and Longknife.
PG's Ramblings 