And we’re done. The Mike Resnick Starship space-opera series is finished with the reading of Starship: Flagship. I’m not thrilled with the alliterative title and some of the discussions that Resnick has in the book on the nature and usefulness of torture is sophomoric at best. But, overall it was a decent ending for a decent series. I’m not sure I’d pick up additional Resnick books after reading this series. Let’s see what happens.

In book 4, Cole decided that his attacks on the Republic ships entering the Inner Frontier weren’t doing enough. Especially after losing huge numbers of ships fighting off the 200 Republic ships that tried to attack Singapore Station. He know has two goals for his fleet, move away from Singapore Station (so it doesn’t stay a Republic target) and try to end the war. He decides, eventually, that the best way to do this is to embarrass the Republic by pretending to blow up worlds that the Republic has already blown up. The theory is that either he makes the Republic look incompetent, since they can’t stop him from blowing up planets, or evil, because the Republic has already blown them up. This works to so extent and Cole gets the head of the Navy, Fleet Admiral Garcia, to resign.

Then Cole decides to surrender and do a trojan horse gambit, which only works because it’s thought that bringing Cole directly to the head of the government is a good idea (which it obviously isn’t). Just when the negotiations begin, the Republic is attacked by an unknown enemy. Cole gets promoted to Fleet Admiral and will get the entire Republic leadership to resign, if he can stop the attackers. It’s just gets silly now, as Cole continues his unending winning streak and, of course, defeats the enemy and makes everyone happy.

This book has some basic plot issues with both the Trojan Horse gambit, as well as the fake bombing gambit. But the biggest issue is Cole’s reliance on torture to try and help The Octopus and his men who were captured on a foolhardy mission. Resnick does show people on both sides of the torture discussion, but never really gets whether or not torture works. A little discussion is held on that topic, but it’s just decided that torture works and that Cole was right to do it. The people who opposed the tortured are punished, to some extent, and the rescue is successful. And there is a very poor discussion in the author’s section on the necessity of torture. It’s a sad event that made me turn ever further away from this series, which I had somewhat liked. It still had the same issues as the previous books in the series, flat characters, Cole always winning, etc. But I’m not sure I can really recommend this book.

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