THE BOOTLEGGER BROADCAST

A band of space-going reality TV adventurers is forced into a dangerous smuggling escapade to aid an alien civilization of tortoises in their war against genocidal humanoid hares.

Pearce continues his Green Charisma series of sardonic space-opera adventures in this series entry. In the future, videographer-producer-director Ian “Mac” MacIntyre aspires to package a reality TV action series starring his two partners. Joe Drake, portraying Captain Charisma, is a big, boisterous former soldier whose past exploits keep coming back to haunt the team, and Sanraya ba’Marta is a Vellaran—a formidable and alluring female lizard-humanoid—acting as an adjunct fighter and general purpose science officer. (Vellarans’ “heads are roundish, like a human’s, and they have two eyes, two earflaps, and a nose. Granted, their mouths are filled with serrated triangular teeth, but emotionally they differ little from humans.”) She has also become the acrimoniously divorced Mac’s lover (apparently, the sex between Mac and Sanraya is, well, out of this world). But business has been slow, and their Green Charisma Chronicles reality TV enterprise faces ruin if the team fails to contrive episodes with some sort of excitement. The trio undertake an assignment from a non-human humanitarian organization to smuggle vital medicine to a distant, resource-rich world derisively known as Clodhopper. There, a genocidal empire called the Polavians, whose members happen to bear an ironic resemblance to fluffy bunny rabbits, is waging a campaign of occupation and extermination against the less advanced, terrapinlike natives called Clodhoppers. (It’s a tortoise vs. hare situation, but escalated to an interplanetary conflict.) The stakes get higher when the Alliance (a military authority) steps in and forces the heroes to accept contraband weapons to deliver to the embattled Clodhoppers. Further complications include the spaceship provided for the job (an unimpressive-looking vessel piloted by a saucy artificial intelligence), resentful rival mercenaries out to grab the mission for themselves, and the fact that “Captain Charisma” Joe previously fought the nasty, long-eared Polavians during his legitimate military career and is now considered an infamous war criminal with a substantial bounty on his head.

The yarn is mostly military SF blended with a minor, sidelong satire of entertainment media; Mac has to repeatedly remind himself and readers that drone cameras are in play, and that the squad are supposed to be filming a show (“Tracking my gaze, a heads-up display allowed me to control the camera’s flight operations, lighting, focus, zoom function, and other features”). Though generous opportunities for spoofing present themselves readily—after all, we are talking about killer rabbit commandos, not to mention noble Clodhoppers carrying an echo of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it gag reference—the preponderance of the material is delivered in a mock-serious manner by Mac’s he-man first-person narration (“Interrogation is a four-letter word. Nobody likes doing it, myself included, but armies and police have been using it as a means to gather useful intelligence for eons”). Battleground action on land and in the atmosphere rarely lets up, ornamented with occasional inspired puns (the tortoise-folk’s resistance is called the “Shellshock Syndicate”) and absurdities. More rambunctious installments in the series are promised.

Tongue-in-cheek military SF that leans heavier on action than comedy.