Victory Conditions (Vatta's War)

"What an idiot", the protagonists in Vatta's War keep exclaiming, and with good reason. It really feels that everyone in this series who is not either a main character, or super impressed by one, is well and truly an idiot. This results in a novel series that's on the surface about interstellar war, but is in reality about a war against an unceasing parade of criminally stupid obstructive bureaucrats.

This gets really tedious for the reader, as there seems to be no bigger point to be made here: everyone but the protagonists is just blindingly stupid and stubborn, constantly doing The Wrong Thing in order to provide yet another convoluted twist for a plot that would be engaging and interesting, if it wasn't for all the Idiot Ballgames that keep interrupting it. That's the tragedy here: there's an actual gripping war story to be told here, but it keeps getting lost in the weeds.

Vatta's War series was interesting enough to keep me reading, but at the same time it was also so very annoying. The subplots are silly and rely on one contrived coincidence after another. Characterisation is predictable and monochrome. The 'verse is a Wild West of armed and trigger-happy private individuals and inefficient, corrupt public services. You can't even pass it off as serious society building, since there's not a single society, there's a bunch, it's just all of them seem to be caricatures of civilisations populated by fools, who can only be saved from their own idiocy by gung-ho loose cannons.

(I gave all the other books in the series three stars; this one got two stars just because it got saddled with my final annoyances. It's not actually any worse than the others.)