Sentient warship seeks crew for righting galactic wrongs, hunting pirates, and other unspecified adventures. This could be the opening blurb for Superdreadnought, a six-book series written by C.H. Gideon, Craig Martelle and Tim Marquitz. Since Goodreads sees fit to treat the collection as a single unit, and the easiest way to acquire them is buy purchasing the full bundle on Amazon, this review will attempt to cover all six as a single coherent unit.
When we first meet Reynolds, AI captain of the superdreadnought Reynolds, he’s just partitioned himself out into multiple personalities to more efficiently crew the ship, and also give himself some company. Normally, developing distinctive split personalities would be considered a bad thing, but in this case it works fine, plus it give us as the readers some different perspectives on the alien crew that Reynolds is about to begin acquiring.
Reynolds’ primary mission is to pursue the Kurtherians, an evil alien race that menaced Earth (now the Etheric Federation) but fled defeated to the far reaches of space. And so, we see the beginnings of his (their?) journey in Book One, where Reynolds acquires a crew, sorts out a couple of major government issues on one planet, and gets a little revealing of the Big Bad that’s going to cause problems for the next four books.
The series bills itself as AI Space Opera, and that seems to fit the bill pretty well. It’s the battlestars of Battlestar Galactica, likable characters of Star Wars (the good ones, not the sequels), and the weapons of The Expanse. The main cast, both alien and AI, are fun and relatable, and we see some growth from them throughout the series. Reynolds, despite his grim exterior, has a heart (or possibly circuits) of gold, and each book generally stands on its own, like a good Star Trek episode where the Enterprise leaves a planet better off than when they found it.
If there’s one major criticism of the series to be had, it’s that Books Five and Six get a little disjointed. It’s understandable though. Book Five was meant to be the final entry in the series, and reads like it. The crew get one last major tour of their galaxy, the Big Bad threat is resolved, and the credits roll. But! The readers wanted more, and Mssrs Gideon, Martelle, and Marquitz delivered with a Book Six epilogue that simultaneously stands well on its own (to the extent that if I were going to get someone into this series with a single novel, I’d suggest starting with Book Six, then read Books One through Five in order).
Each book is a nice blend of ground- and space-based action, with some local politics thrown in. The language and violence are probably PG, maybe PG-13 at worst, making this a perfectly appropriate series for teen readers. There’s no inherent politics to speak of, unless the idea of concrete good guys and bad guys is now somehow political.
Overall, I enjoyed the series quite a bit. It took me a few months to get through all six books, but I felt they were all well worth it. I’d gotten the first book as a freebie sometime in 2022, and then went and bought the rest of the series after finishing Book One. I definitely got my $10 worth. Rated Five out of Five for time well spent, great characters, and an enjoyable story.