Volume 4 of Rising of the Shield Hero kicks off right where Volume 3 ended. Naofumi and his party are still on the run, framed for crimes they did not commit. For anime watchers, Volume 4’s events were covered by episodes 14 – 21 of the show. Note that this is a higher episode count than the previous volumes. Volumes 1 & 2 each got four episodes while Volume 3 received five. Volume 4 received eight, as many episodes as the first two books combined. So, the events of Volume 4 are more complete in the anime, with fewer small details being skipped over.

This volume more or less wraps up the first major story arc of the series. A lot of issues that began way back in Volume 1 start getting wrapped up here and open the way for new storylines. There is also quite a bit of exhibition as Naofumi learns more about the stakes of fighting the Waves. And about the forces that have been working against him for quite some time. For how dark and dreary of a journey it has been for Naofumi, he starts to see the light at the end of the tunnel here.

Naofumi is not alone in character development. Raphtalia, Filo, and even Melty all develop substantially throughout the story as well. Both in fighting ability and as people. Raphtalia’s story focuses on her past while Filo’s focuses on her future, giving the two another parallel as teammates. The worldbuilding also continues in this volume as readers start to learn more about countries outside Melromarc. The inner workings of Melromarc’s culture and government are further explored as well.

There is another major factor present here: changes to the story. While the ending of Volume 4 reflects episode 21 of the anime, several major details are changed. The events ultimately play out to the same conclusion, but the way things happen is fairly different. It felt like the changes in the anime were present to make Naofumi feel more heroic to the audience. It also felt a bit odd that the anime kept going for a few more episodes during season 1 since this is a really good stopping point in the story.

There are some great feel-good moments in this volume and it is the point where Naofumi really, truly starts to shine as a hero. It will be interesting to see what the next story arc brings as more Waves approach.

Smoke Eaters has a fairly basic premise: firefighters vs. dragons. Going in, it looks like Reign of Fire mixed with Fire Force with a dash of Syfy Channel Original. The story is set a few hundred years in the future, so there is some future-tech like holograms and robots. A few years prior, dragons started emerging from underground to attack people and burn stuff down. This caused vast changes in world governments, causing the U.S. to collapse into city-states and keeping communities mostly isolated. Despite all this, everyday life seems to function about the same as it does for most people today.

Protagonist Cole Brannigan is a firefighter on the cusp of retirement when he inadvertently discovers he is one of the few people with a genetic immunity to smoke inhalation. This gets him forcibly recruited into the anti-dragon task force, the Smoke Eaters. Having an older protagonist in a story like this made Brannigan pretty unusual. Like many older people, he is very set in his ways. So, he bumps heads with his new team when suddenly going from near-retiree to new rookie. That being said, he does have enough plot armor to always land on his feet as the story progresses.

Now let’s talk about tropes. Being a mix between fantasy and sci-fi themes, Smoke Eaters is full of tropes. Dragons are obviously the big one. But the future setting also gives us power armor, ray guns, laser swords, military robots, and more. We also get generic action-story elements like corrupt government officials and evil businessmen. There is a lot going on in this book and it is really hard to tell whether it is more sci-fi than fantasy or vice versa. But it is enough of an action story that worrying about asking “why?” is probably not something readers need to be doing here.

It would be overexaggerating to say this book does not have a plot. But there are a lot of concepts, including the state of society, that readers need to just take for granted. It is a post-apocalyptic setting, so just roll with it. Smoke Eaters is the type of book you read when you just want to kill an afternoon with something fun. Not because you are trying to analyze a great work of literature. This is the just-for-fun type of grimdark, not the gritty variety. Now let’s get a made-for-TV movie adaption!

I picked up One Word Kill for two reasons: I like Mark Lawrence and I like Dungeons and Dragons. Objectively speaking, this book is probably 5 stars. I personally could not get that into it, so I am meeting halfway with a 4-star review. My opinion here is probably biased because I am used to reading longer books. When you normally stick to 400-800 page novels, something 200 pages feels too short. Less time for plot and character development makes things seemed rushed. Not necessarily bad, just rushed. But this book feels like it also needs a bit of pre-existing knowledge to be fully appreciated.

So, first there is the title: One Word Kill. This refers to a magic spell in the Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) game the characters play called Power Word Kill. In D&D, almost everything is determined by rolling dice. Whether your character hits an enemy or is hit in turn, how well social interactions go, and more. Power Word Kill is a very powerful endgame spell that ignores dice and just kills the target. Many people who play the game consider it BS. While the book explains all this, it is a bit hard to appreciate unless you have first-hand experience with it. That is a key theme here; how some things are so hard to fight it makes the battle seem unwinnable.

The other big thing here is the mystery; the mysterious stranger and the friend in danger. On a story level it is constructed well, but it was not all that mysterious. From the perspective of the main character, sure, there was tension and build-up. But for nerds who regularly occupy their time with sci-fi/fantasy stories, not so much. On top of that, it cannot be said that this story really did anything new.

One Word Kill takes place in the 80’s and the characters are kids. Stranger Things, check. Fantasy games are being used as a metaphor to battle serious, real-world problems. A Monster Calls and I Kill Giants, check. And more, but other comparisons cannot be mentioned in this review without spoilers.

Analysis aside, this is a good book. It was Mark Lawrence’s first crack at sci-fi over his usual fantasy work and he did a damn fine job. Despite all the nitpicking in this review. If you want something to read on a weekend afternoon, you could do a lot worse than One Word Kill.

Dead and Alive sort of wraps up Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein series. Originally, these books were meant to be a trilogy. Later, Koontz revisited them and wrote two more books. The ending of Dead and Alive is a bit open ended; enough that a sequel was viable, but not so much that readers will feel dissatisfied with the ending. The story here is a bit more fast-paced than the first two books. The characters know what is going on and things are more out in the open now. All that is left is stopping Victor Helios’ (Dr. Frankenstein’s) mad plan.

The thing is, the characters don’t really do much to accomplish that. The main characters against Helios are Deucalion (Frankenstein’s monster) and the two detectives. The detectives are just kind of…there. They spend most of the book surviving, not actively going after Victor. Deucalion himself straight-up says that he needs them because he cannot directly kill Victor. Their role in the plan is really to just pull the trigger once he’s been cornered. Deucalion takes a more active role by learning about Victor’s plans and sabotaging them. But even still, he is not the one who causes Victor’s downfall.

Ultimately, it is Victor who sabotages Victor. As Deucalion stated in the previous books, Victor’s weakness is his vanity. He considers himself and his work so perfect that he assumes his victory is a matter of when, not if. So, when it all starts to fall apart around him, Victor is blind to the issues at hand. He considers his work so perfect and infallible that it never even occurs to him that something he created could be fundamentally broken. While this is a great hubris for a character like Victor, it diminishes the protagonist’s role in the story. They help, but they’re not directly the cause of the villain’s downfall.

With each new book in Koontz’s Frankenstein series, I grew less impressed. More so with the 4^th and 5^th books that were tacked on later. But those have their own plotline and were unentertaining enough that I don’t even intend to take the time writing up reviews for those two. The real issue with Dead and Alive was that things didn’t get sewn up nicely by the end. Rather, they all fell haphazardly into place. Things are ok for the protagonists once the story is over, but not by their own merit. They didn’t win because they did well, they won because the villain did poorly. The victory didn’t feel earned and that makes for a dull conclusion.

For you anime watchers, Volume 3 of That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime covers episodes 16 – 19(-ish) of the show. The beginning of episode 20 has some events from the very end of Volume 3, but most of that episode kicks off the events of Volume 4. This book starts off following the aftermath of Volume 2. With the Jura Tempest Federation solidified into a new but still budding country, the new nation’s leadership face new challenges. This more or less divides the book into two parts: the political aspect and military actions.

As Rimuru begins organizing the country’s resources and top people, other nations begin to take notice of the new nation. While he and his subordinates are skilled in combat, politics is a whole new battlefield for them. New allies will be made who seek to partner with the Federation and learn from their technological advances. At the same time, enemies who covet the forest’s rich resources set their hungry eyes upon the new, small country. In this dog-eat-dog world, it is only a matter of time before the Federation is pressed into military action.

Every book in this series has had a big fight sequence so far and Volume 3 keeps that trend moving. The exact details of the fight are spoilery, but the battle goes to show that Rimuru and his gang are far from all-powerful. It is true that their strength has grown by leaps and bounds in a short amount of time. But in this world of monsters, they are still little fish in a big pond. They can hold their own when working together, but there are still enemies far beyond them individually. Rimuru having a Naraku/Majin Buu/Sylar/Borg power makes this less of an issue with each defeated enemy though.

Aside from the cringy cover art (that new character gets more clothes during the story, I promise), Volume 3 was pretty on par with the first two books. With the characters’ powers increasingly so dramatically from one book to the next, that may or may not remain the case as the series progresses. Isekai’s tend to be littered with overpowered protagonists and this is no exception. Heck, this series would probably set the high-bar for that if Overlord didn’t exist. While That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime comes across as more of a YA series than other light novels, it is still entertaining enough.

Triumphant is the finale of the Genesis Fleet trilogy, the prequel to The Lost Fleet. Going in, I did not know whether this was the last book or if the Genesis Fleet would keep going. But Jack Campbell’s original Lost Fleet series was 6 books. Then the follow-up, Beyond the Frontier, was 5 books. And the spin-off series The Lost Stars was 4 books. Now the Genesis Fleet wraps up with 3 books. I am sensing a pattern here. Are we in for a duology next? And maybe a single, standalone book that wraps up everything? Time will tell and Triumphant hints on the series future, but more on that later.

Things kick off shortly after the end of the last book, unlike the time-skip between books 1 & 2. Campbell’s other series focused on massive wars and other conflicts between powerful, established space nations. The Genesis Fleet tells the story of how those nations were first established. There is a fair amount of parallelism with the real world here. People are traveling out into the unknown to stake their claim and get land of their own. But away from established civilization, there is an increasing threat of lawlessness. Now is the time when whether the people choose to fight will determine not only their future, but the futures of generations to come.

If you have already read Campbell’s other books, you have a rough idea of how Triumphant will end. Many of the characters here are ancestors of the previous books’ casts, so assumptions can be made regarding how survives. But while the stakes in Triumphant are no less extreme than the previous series, the battles are much more small scale. It is not a fleet of hundreds of warships threatening a galaxy-spanning civilization. It is a single-digit group of ships threatening new colonies. But a single ship is more than enough to kill everyone on a world.

While the previous series focus on large-scale, broad military conflict, The Genesis Fleet is more of a revolutionary war. People are fighting with military cast-offs and makeshift weapons. But it does not change the fact that they are fighting for their homes and families. And they will fight with every ounce of strength and courage they have to see them protected. While at the same time, others put the same amount of effort into subjugating their fellow man.

This series was an absolute blast. It was low-stakes, yet it was not. It was a prequel with a semi-determined ending, yet it keeps you on the edge of your seat. There is a fantastic balance between combat, politics, personal character development, and world-building (something hard to do which Jack Campbell has greatly improved upon in his career). And it features a nice little epilogue with some more familiar characters that leaves the Lost Fleet universe very open. I am excited to see where Jack Campbell takes it next.

Tie Fighter is the graphic novel tie-in prequel to the novel Alphabet Squadron. Originally published as a mini-series, the 5^th and final issue of Tie Fighter did not actually come out until after Alphabet Squadron was published. So, it is hard to argue that reading Tie Fighter beforehand is really a requirement. Whereas Alphabet Squadron is about a ragtag group of pilots still more used to being Rebels than New Republic, Tie Fighter tells the story from the other side. This mini-series focuses on the Imperial fighter squadron that Alphabet Squadron spends their story hunting: Shadow Wing.

Being a mini-series, Tie Fighter is fast paced. There were only 5 issues to tell a story and the author knew that going in. Normally this would raise my hackles a bit, but Tie Fighter also has the benefit of being a prequel comic. It was never the intention of this mini-series to tell the whole story. It is distinctively not supposed to do that; that is the Alphabet Squadron trilogy’s job. Instead, it is a rare look at things from the Imperial side of the war. And it takes place in one of the most interesting time periods in Disney’s new canon: the immediate years following Return of the Jedi.

Star Wars as a franchise has a very impressive cast of villains. From Tarkin to Thrawn to Darth Vader and the Emperor, the villains are often much more interesting than the heroes. But not all the baddies are big bads. There are also the boots on the ground (or in this case, wings in the air). Seeing how the common, everyday soldiers do things is rare in Star Wars. And rarer still to see it from the Imperial side. It is always fascinating to see how these people justify their actions when we, as the audience, know how evil the Empire can be.

These stories taking place after Episode VI are amazing for how quick the Empire fell given the scope of it. Just a few years prior to this, the Empire reigned supreme. The largest military in galactic history, ruling from one side of the galaxy to the other with an iron fist. And now…they are dying. Things started to fall apart from the moment the Emperor died. And some Imperials are struggling to cope with that. Shadow Wing knows they are part of a dying breed, but they will do their duty. Like the more common Rebel protagonists, they are still people. With hopes and dreams and aspirations and fears. And villains who seem more human are always better for it.