The Renegat

Diving Series, Book 8

By: Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Narrated by: Jennifer Van Dyck

Length: 28 hrs and 5 mins

Publisher's summary

As a young recruit, brilliant engineer Nadim Crowe accidentally destroys an entire Scrapheap full of ships. Now, decades later, he ends up on the crew of the Renegat, the only ship in the Fleet ever sent on a mission backward to investigate an ancient Scrapheap.

Something invaded that Scrapheap, and the Fleet wants to know what. Or who.

The Renegat: The only ship the Fleet dares risk. The Renegat: A ship of misfits and screw-ups sent on an impossible mission. All alone in deep space.

A thrilling new addition to the Diving Universe.

©2019 Kristine Kathryn Rusch (P)2019 Audible, Inc.

I thought it was fantastic!

Where some reviews think this book is too slow or has holes such as "no documentation" but I thought it was a great read. The storyline addresses the stupidity of the fleet by always "moving forward" without keeping long term (documentation) histories in mind. The fleet never learns or acknowledges their cultural mistakes, only their tech mistakes. They act as though cultures are something to be dismissed. This theme is what drives Captains like Crow and Cooper to work towards something better. I think some previous reviewers missed the point. This book (and series) makes a statement about the importance of cultural understanding, the importance of individual perspective, and the individual's influence on the whole. I really enjoyed it.

No engineering documentation

This story portrays the space craft techs and engineers as people who work on highly complex devices using no documentation, gossip and speculation as their main skill set.

While the concept of no documentation may have made sense at the beginning of this series due to the archaeological setting of ancient, unknown, space craft “wrecks”,

The setting for this story takes place far in the distant past when the craft were actively used for exploration.

No or incomplete documentation for a production line craft is incompetence
-not an intelligent story

R

Another Great Epic Novel

Stellar storytelling from master novelist and short story Kristine Kathryn Rusch will leave you with one regret- the Story ended.

Run don't walk to the Diving Universe series.

Maybe the best of the series...

... and that's saying something! Great twists and turns. Really enjoyed it, love the whole Diving series.

Engaging Story

Kept my interest throughout! Looking forward to what happens to Crowe and his crew. The narration was excellent as well.

ok

Confusing, too much time and space jumping around , not clear on the characters at the end of the book and their choices. 

Too Long and Too Slow

I have read all the major novels in the Diving Series, and this, the longest, is the least satisfactory. Kristine Rusch's characters are prone to overthink, rethink a situation, mull things over, and review their options, to such a degree that it really annoys me. In her previous novels and in the Retrieval Artist Series, this writing style has not been a major problem because the books in both series have been of normal length. The Renegat, however, is 28 hours long, a big book by any standard. Because the book is so long, the characters' overthinking is extreme and slows down the plot progression to a crawl. Her people also are more likely to just think to themselves than communicate to others, leading to a real paucity of normal conversation. This lack of communication causes problems and perhaps that's the point the author wants to make, but I just want to strangle someone to get them to say what they are thinking. There is a lot to like about the story, which would have been better told if it were half the length. There are mysteries, the vastness of space to contemplate, and emergencies to deal with that are exciting, all which would be better in a shorter work.
I still have issues with some of the SF background in the series. I have trouble accepting a star drive, the Ancapa drive, that can fold space, send a ship across light years (I assume, the author doesn't specify) but is about the size of a basketball and fits in a container next to the captain's chair. Also, after 5000 years or so of use, it's still unreliable, which doesn't make a lot of sense to me. And I don't understand the political structure of the galaxy, how it is governed, what is the fleet's actual role, and how it is financed. At the beginning, we are treated to the spectacle of a scrap heap with a million ships. Where does the fleet get the money to scrap a million ships? Why is the fleet always moving on, abandoning sectors? What is a sector anyway? It seems strange to me that the fleet moves on and then there is concern that anarchy and war will develop in the abandoned sectors. The author never provides answers to these obvious questions, and thus fails to flesh out a truly believable future universe.
Maybe some of these questions will be answered in the future, and maybe the author will provide more digestible 10-11 hour novels, as I would like to continue with the series.

Yadda Yadda Yadda

I love this series and have been waiting for this installment. It begins with a wonderful previously published short story. But after that, all these characters do is talk and talk and think about talking and second-guess all the thoughts and all the decisions and have conflicts with hidden(to the reader) motives. And the action moves at a snail's pace, flipping between the past and the future until we finally, excruciatingly arrive at the central event, which is so anticlimactic that I wondered what I'd missed. The author says the next book's long, I hope it's better.

Wow, this is boring...

The level of detail used to describe every single thought that each character has is bordering on mind-numbing. If every person went though the level of mental machinations that these characters do in order to make some, no, *any* kind of decision, it would leave their world absolutely paralyzed. And while I've enjoyed Jennifer Van Dyck's narration for Rusch's books in the past, she's developed a halting, William Shatner-esque/Captain Kirk cadence for this missive. I've been listening to Rusch's Diving Universe books since the beginning and I've consumed them within hours of their release, eagerly awaiting the next. This one? I've started, put aside, restarted, hoped it would pick up some speed, been frustrated, put aside, started it again thinking I need to give it more than 8 hours, been frustrated again, rolled my eyes over and over again with how serious everything in this universe has become, and set it aside, again. I suppose I'll have to finish it at some point so when the next one comes out, I'll know what's going on, but wow... This is a slog.