In Her Name Review

Sometimes I come across things to try in strange ways. My wife has a number of independent authors who she has followed on twitter and suggested I check them out. One of them is Michael R. Hicks and he has published several books in a Science Fiction series called In Her Name. The books are broken into three trilogies, one still being written, and the first books in the released trilogies are available for free as e-books.

Not one to pass up on free books, I downloaded In Her Name: First Contact and In Her Name: Empire through iBooks. I started reading the series with In Her Name: First Contact, which tells the story of what happens when mankind accidentally discovers a technologically superior and vastly older warlike alien race, the Kreelans. The Kreelans make it a habit of going to war with any alien race they discover.

In First Contact, we learn that the Kreelans are an ancient race that is connected spiritually by a connection they call the Bloodsong that shares their emotions and passions and the will of their Empress to all Kreelans. The Kreelan race is slowly dying out and they have a prophecy that someday an alien will be found whose blood can sing and this will be the Kreelan’s salvation. After contact with humans, the Kreelans go to war to test mankind to determine if their souls can sing.

The rest of the first trilogy (chronologically) of the In Her Name series is continued in the books Legend of the Sword and Dead Soul (or collected in a single volume called In Her Name: The Last War). After reading In Her Name: First Contact, I bought The Last War as an e-book through Amazon for less than $5 (it is not available on iBooks). The Last War is a good military Science Fiction story with man fighting to survive against aliens they don’t understand and against their own nature (politics, pettiness and greed).

I have also read In Her Name: Empire, the first book of the second trilogy. Empire is set about a hundred years later during the conflict between the Kreelans and the human Confederation. Empire is the story of Reza Gard, a young boy who loses his parents, is put in a labor camp for orphans and later is captured by the Kreelans and trained in the Kreelan culture. I felt that Empire (which was written before The Last War) was more Space Opera in nature and deals with the details of Reza and is life and what he learns as a Kreelan prisoner than the greater war between man and Kreelans.

I liked these books and will be buying the second trilogy collection, In Her Name: Redemption to see how the conflict between the Kreelans and man ends. It was refreshing in The Last War to have a story where not everyone lives through the massive conflict that the book describes. There are characters that do extraordinary things, but many of them do not cheat death repeatedly. I also liked the unique culture of the alien race and how it was described.

You should download the free e-books In Her Name: First Contact and In Her Name: Empire. If you like Science Fiction, you will enjoy them and want to get the rest of the story. Here are my ratings for the books in the series I have read so far:

In Her Name: First Contact – 4 Mick Happies.

In Her Name: The Last War – 3 and a half Mick Happies.

In Her Name: Empire – 3 Mick Happies.

After reading these books, let’s hope when we do finally travel among the stars that any alien races we encounter are peaceful.