Yawn level with the luminous waves;
I finished The Macedonian 2 nights ago. It was pretty good overall.
This book broke a lot of new ground for the series — it’s the first one to follow a character we’ve already met: in this case, Favian Markham, protagonist of the previous book, The Raider. Secondly, the story spent more than half of its length on ground, not in a boat. The others have very much been focused on sailing and being on the sea, with occasional brief interludes on land, but that’s it. This book begins with Favian’s trial for the events ending the previous book, then follows him in some political dealings with secessionists and his mistress, his onetime fiancee and some British spies, etc. It was pretty interesting, but not very typical of the series. It’s clear that Williams has a very good grasp of the politics of the time, and it was quite educational for me, someone with little to no knowledge of America during this period.
Anyways, after some political posturing, Favian ends up in a rebuilt ship that he’d helped capture at the beginning of the previous novel; the titular Macedonian. He takes it under somewhat questionable circumstances, but plans a great commercial raid in the Indian Ocean, hoping that if he’s able to inflict massive economic damage on the relatively unprotected shipping lines there, he’ll be forgiven for more or less stealing a ship. He just barely escapes the British blockade and then luckily is able to sneak up on a British ship at night, taking it unawares and capturing not just the ship but something much more valuable — the code books, log books, and military communications carried by it. Learning a frightening fact from the new intelligence, he gives up his previous mission and races back to the US to inform the Government of an imminent and potentially crippling attack. And then…
Well, at that point the book ends — this is the other way in which it largely differs from the previous books, ending in a cliffhanger. The others have all ended fairly neatly, not with pat ending necessarily, but tidily. I think Williams had, at this point, begun to run out of ideas and was kind of grasping for things to write books about. There’s only one more book in the series, and I haven’t read it yet, but I suspect that it won’t be as good as this one, and further that it’s a good thing that it’s the last book.
I’m now reading David Brin’s Contacting Aliens. It’s really good — in fact I’m almost done with it.