Switchblade Honey is Star Trek for those with more of a cynical streak than most of Gene Roddenberry's fans. Ellis admits in his introduction right upfront that this whole thing started as a gag, sort of a riff on Star Trek, but while there's definitely a less-than-serious air about the whole thing, Switchblade Honey isn't a humor piece. It's science-fiction high adventure with more than a little bad attitude, and, courtesy of Brandon McKinney, some pretty sleek looking starships. It is a little light, and some of the ideas don't really come through as well as they could, but this is a genre rarely tackled well at all, and there are plenty of fun moments in this story.
Just as with the first episode of any given Star Trek series, half the point of this story is to introduce the crew and make us care about them. Ellis opens up by showing that the crew are a bunch of criminals, but they're the interesting kind of criminals, the one who turned to crime because of unjust laws or societal structures. The Captain refused to murder a bunch of his own men in order to take out a few enemy ships. The First Officer mutilated her rapist captain. The rest committed crimes that are really only crimes in the eyes of a wholly corrupt bureaucracy, not worth saving.
And really, that's a big part of the point. To Ellis, the Federation is a bunch of stuffy old men who don't smoke, drink or do anything else fun and for whom humanity is an intellectual exercise rather than a part of their being. This small crew is about the best representation of why humanity deserves to survive, even though they're a bunch of cursing, hard-drinking, chain-smoking and occasionally drug-addicted criminals. That they're also a lot more fun to hang around with than the prim and proper 16th century English navy in starships isn't a big surprise.
However, the crux of the conflict here is that despite the problems with humanity's choice of leaders, they don't necessarily deserve subjugation or death by an alien race that is just as arrogant. So while the crew of Switchblade Honey is faced with real, physical problems like how to stop the aliens' killer weapon (once they figure out what it is) and fight a guerrilla style war when the real war is all but lost, the real question here is can they forgive what was done to them by humanity in the name of serving the larger concept of humanity that got them all thrown in the clink in the first place?
Half the fun of this book is the interaction between the characters, and the witty and often misanthropic banter that passes between them. Clearly, this was mostly the reason Ellis wanted to write the book. The downside is that the other half of Star Trek, the fun stuff like starship combat and tactics, is given short shrift as a result. It's not that Ellis ignores it - there are about three different engagements here - it's that it doesn't really seem to play into his strengths or the strengths of McKinney. The ships are well designed and the explosions and gunfire lavishly illustrated, but the action scenes tend to go by awful fast, and one key sequence, the finale, isn't entirely clear on what happened, which left me a bit unsatisfied with the conclusion.
Still, in just about every other aspect, McKinney's work is pretty impressive. His design for Switchblade Honey is simple but as impressive as it needs to be, and our first glimpse of the ship is a fun moment. He's also put a fair amount of work into the characters, especially the ship's captain, which makes it easy to get into the story and care about what the characters are going through. And while I have some quibbles with some of the starship combat, there are definitely moments where the sense of speed or action comes through nicely, such as the Switchblade flying off as Jupiter jets gas at their pursuers, or the opening sequence that gets Captain Ryder thrown into prison in the first place.
