Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #43040 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-18
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Customer Reviews

Where do they come from?
I'm not sure what book that other guy read. One of the best parts of The Clone Republic was the way the characters developed. That's the point of the book, isn't it? It's about an army in which everyone looks alike and is made with the same DNA, yet they do not act or think alike.
Kent pulls that off quite well.
About this book being boring, it did drag a bit in the middle when the main character and his sidekick go on an unexpected vacation to Hawaii. That was a bit strange, but boring? The book was never boring, not even during that unnecessary side trip.

Boooring
I cannot disagree more with the other reviewers they must have been reading a different book. I love Military Sci Fi but this book just didnt make the cut. The central character is plastic and I just couldn't be interested in what happens to him in this book or the next which I also bought. This books author was recommended as being like the Linnea Sinclair, Mike Shepherd and Ian Douglas. They are not, each of these authors books have engaging characters with lots of exciting events and interaction between characters.

If you're looking for something to put you to sleep you've found the book for you otherwise give it a miss.

Tale of an individual in an army of clones
This is a story of a marine in an army in which all the other non-commissioned personnel are identical to each other.

It is the first book of a trilogy, which works best when read in the chronological sequence, which is

The Clone Republic
Rogue Clone
The Clone Alliance

Steven Kent's novel includes a number of features which have appeared in many other science fiction stories, but he usually manages to make them seem original.

There is an army of clones, a particularly huge spaceship, ethnic tensions between humans on distant planets, an oppressive central government which has grown out of modern democratic institutions but is no longer democratic, infighting between the space admirals and senators who rule the galaxy, a ruthless bounty hunter, a hero who has to come to terms with his real identity - you name the Star Wars/SF cliche and it's here, but Kent does manage to find new things to say about almost all of them.

In form the story is a bildungsroman narrated by the central character, Wayson Harris.

In the prologue Harris has been promoted to be an officer and been put in command of a platoon of marines holding an outpost on a distant planet, Ravenwood, which is about to be attacked. He does not expect himself or any of his men to survive. Describing his situation, he begins the book with the words "You picked a hell of a place to die, Marine."

Then the story goes back to his first posting as a private after leaving marine training school and he starts to narrate his history from there up to his arrival on Ravenwood.

Commissioned officers are recruited from volunteers with "normal" family backgrounds, but all of Wayson Harris's fellow enlisted marines and soldiers are clones who grew up in "orphanages." At the start of the book Wayson Harris, believes himself to be a genuine orphan rather than a clone, although he knows that each of the clone soldiers is genetically programmed to see himself as slightly different from all the identical solders around him. It is rumoured that any clone who finds out that he is a clone is programmed to die.

Wayson Harris really is different from the standard clones around him - for example, he is four inches taller. But as the story continues both Harris and the reader begin to wonder exactly who and what he really is. As the galaxy prepares for civil war. Harris soon discovers that he has both powerful friends and enemies and he is caught up in their plans for that war.

Well worth a read if you're into military SF. I can also strongly recommend the sequels, "Rogue Clone" and "The Clone Alliance." But if you are planning to read the whole trilogy, tackle "The Clone Republic" first, as the second and third books gives away most of the mysteries which Harris is trying to understand in the early part of the first one.