Well, I’m getting a little tired of this series in that I was never a fan of “fantasy” sci-fi and that’s what this has definitely turned into. A very weird kind of story with Army Rangers fighting 10,000 years in the future agains orcs, wizards, witches, ogers and other such creatures that just don’t exist. Now, these fully equipped Army Rangers are resorting to sword and dagger fights when closing with these weird enemies. There’s also some magic thrown in and I’m just getting a little tired of it!
For some reason that hasn’t been fully explained, this Ranger unit is off on sailing ships heading for another part of this strange world. They believe they have to defeat another Medusa creature at this other locations just after defeating a dragon thing that was causing them problems where they were. Our Private Talker is still narrating the story as though he is writing about what is happening to the Rangers in this world. The writing is pretty straight-forward and easy to read, but it’s there’s just too much fantasy in the story now and more seems to be coming.
We spend a lot of time in the story just getting back to shore where we have to setup our attacks against this new Medusa. Of course she has her own forces that are trying to kill all the Rangers, but they don’t faire real well against modern guns and bullets. From a distance, the Rangers can pretty much hold off all sorts of bad guys, but there are just so many that keep coming. Some of these creatures are huge and take a lot of punishment before they go down. Even Private Talker isn’t immune to some of this fantasy stuff when he gets to listening to some mermaids lyrical songs that captivated the Rangers minds and also made them a captive of these vampire-like mermaids.
So, there’s a lot of fighting against some pretty tough enemies and Rangers are getting killed. The Sergeant Major and even the Captain get tied up in separate battles so it takes awhile for the Rangers to sort things out and get back on mission. Still, there is an interesting twist to the story which specifically involves Talker. He’s attempting to rescue on of his fellow Rangers and that might not be possible. We’ll have to see how this comes out in the next book.
Book five, “The Book of Joe”, is up for pre-order on Amazon and should be available 1 Dec 2021. I’ll probably get it, I guess!