Stand on Xanadu – This series is continuing strong.

Stand on Xanadu.
The Lunar Free State, #9.
By John E. Siers.
My rating ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

What do you do when one of your deep space survey ships discovers a fertile, Earth-like planet that isn’t currently occupied by humans or any other intelligent species? 

If you’re the Lunar Free State, you make plans to put a colony there—and try to keep it secret so the Confederated Nations of Earth don’t do the same. Unfortunately, though, the secret gets out, and the CNE scrambles to launch their own colony project, starting a race by both nations to make their claim to the planet.

But when exobiologist Kim Jin Li discovers that the planet does, in fact, have native intelligent life—a race of feline predators that communicate telepathically—the discovery sets up a confrontation between LFS and CNE warships in orbit, and the LFS Marines and CNE Peacekeepers on the ground.

Is this the beginning of the long-expected final war between the Lunar Free State and the Confederated Nations of Earth?

Another good book in the The Lunar Free State series. Of the nine books in the series, so far, seven have been solid four stars, one a three star and one did a dip down to two stars.

This one is a four star one. Maybe not a super strong four star one but a four star one nonetheless.

The book follows the previous book in the time line and throws in a new twist in the form of a new planet with, as it turns out, not only intelligent but telepathic inhabitants.

Then of course, in comes the CNE, which essentially is a merge of the useless, and has we have recently come to learn terrorist supporting, UN and EU. Of course it all goes to hell as one could expect. CNE has the same non-existent respect for freedom and moral values as the politicians in UN and EU has today.

This is really why these books never seem to go above four stars for me. There is constantly this background noise of despicable political asshattery which is really grating one me.

As usual, the rest of the book is really good though. Although, I would say that the title is quite a bit of hyperbole. From that title I would have expected a bit of… you now… an actual stand, a show down and some nice fighting towards the end.

Well, that does not really happen. Sure the CNE dumbasses got their asses kicked again but not really enough for them to get the message and the hinted at “final war” just fizzles out. I have to say I felt a wee bit disappointed at the end.