Mechwarrior: Dark Age #7: Temptation and War (A Battletech Novel)

The Word of Blake, an Armageddon cult, launched its jihad against the colonized worlds over sixty five years ago, wanting to destroy any trace of life in the galaxy. A leader rose up during this time, Destin Stone, and eventually he destroyed the Word of Blake after millions were savagely murdered. As a reward for his victory, he becomes the leader of the new Republic of the Sphere made up all the planets in a 125 light year radius of Terra.

Part of the Cappellan worlds including Liao was forced out of their confederacy and into the republic without being given a voice in their own destiny. Years later the Chancellor of the Cappellan Confederation Daosher Lia wants to bring these worlds back under his government rather than the weakening republic. He sends his emissary Mai Wa to Liao to sow dissent and discord that will start a revolution. With the help of freedom fighter Evan Kurst, Wa's former protégée, they start a civil war that spreads across the...Read more

I'm a huge fan of the battletech novels and the mechwarrior games, but I've been relatively disappointed with the new novels in the Dark Age setting. I was particularly displeased with the Proving Grounds trilogy, which seemed to leave out the most important thing in a BT book.....interesting mechs!

Fortunately, By Temptations and By War does not suffer from this problem. While it fits in well in the Dark Age setting by not having regiments of Battlemechs stomping around, the author has still managed to put a decent number of mechs in (actual battlemechs, not agromechs). Even better, the author has included a couple of interesting Cappellan mech designs that I hadn't heard of before.

The storyline is also well written, and provides a perspective that few of the battletech books in the past have shown since it is told mostly from a Cappellan view point, and the Liaos aren't automatically painted as the (somewhat shallow) bad guys as they were in some earlier novels.

By...Read more

Loren L. Coleman is, in my opinion, one of the best writers in the Battletech/Mechwarrior franchise, so after a number of weak entries in the Dark Age series (The Ruins of Power, the trilogy preceding this book), I was hoping Coleman could get things back on track. Sadly, he left me disappointed.

To begin with, I found the main characters of Mai Uhn Wa and Evan Kurst to be wholly unlikable, so I found myself not caring much at all about their quest for the independence of Liao, and actually rooting against them for the entire book. Kurst was especially bad, as his motivations for certain actions were rather confusing. For example, he openly hates the Betrayer of Liao, who brought about the Capellan attack on Liao that killed Evan's parents...but he joins a movement that encourages violence, and gladly welcomes another violent Capellan invasion. Odd. He also distances himself from his only friends for the majority of the book, so when Coleman tries (poorly) to humanize him...Read more