The final portion of my July order from Amazon – The Clone Elite by Steven L Kent – arrived on Friday!Humanity has spread across the Milky Way. The Unified Authority (UA), modelled after the United States of America and Plato’s Republic, resorts to the use of clones as soldiers, though led by natural-born officers. In 2510, a separatist war erupts when four of the six spiral arms of the galaxy declare independence from the UA, incited by a religious cult commonly referred to as Mogats. However, infighting between the rebel factions forces the Confederate Arms Treaty Organization (CATO) to form an alliance with the Unified Authority, leading to a successful combined UA/CATO attack on the Mogat home world that ends the war.
The attack on the Mogat home world draws out their alien allies then known as Space Angels. Now the aliens are turning on human colonies one by one, seemingly unstoppable, heading for Earth. Desperate for soldiers, the UA constitutes a mandatory conscription of retired clones, and the planet New Copenhagen is selected as the site for an all-or-nothing last stand against the alien invaders.
The Clone Elite is the fourth instalment of the so-called Clone series by Steven L Kent. I am a sucker for series, so I’ll keep buying and reading them as they come, but The Clone Elite is easily the weakest book in the series so far. The story is mostly monotonous and often repetitive. Little, if anything, new is learned about series protagonist Wayson Harris or his occasional sidekick Ray Freeman. Little of import too is revealed about the aliens, especially their motives and their arrangement with the Mogats. I suppose more will be revealed in subsequent books.
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PS: With The Clone Elite, which I finished reading late Saturday night, I’ve reached my twelve books target for 2008!
a man on a mission eh?
ReplyDeleteWho do you mean?
ReplyDeleteHarris is a clone – he is hard-wired to fight for humanity, while I’m just doing my bit to contribute to the nation’s reading average!
:P