Reviewed by Dan
TITLE: Alien Victory
SERIES: Alien Danger #3
AUTHOR: Mark Zubro
PUBLISHER: MLR Press
LENGTH: 360 Pages
BLURB:
The conclusion to the great gay sci-fi epic.
In the concluding volume of the Alien Danger series the perils and dangers of the universe converge on the lovers, Mike from Earth, and Joe from Hrrrm an unlikely pair to have fallen in love. Together they struggle to build a world safe for gay people and keep the dangers and prejudices of the world at bay. All leading to the final titanic battle between prejudice and all that is good and kind.
REVIEW:
Welcome back to the tale of Mike, a waiter from Chicago; and his husband Joe, an intergalactic cop from the Empire of the Hrrrm. This is the third book in the series, and I would highly recommend reading the first two before beginning this one, as the background story is important and not really contained in this book. Click here for my review of the first two books in the series.
For those of you who have read the first two books, you will remember that Mike was a waiter in an eclectic eatery in Chicago when he met Joe. It turned out that Joe was an intergalactic cop, on Earth hunting for a rogue scientist. In the first two books of the series, the two hunt down the scientist, Mike gets a communicator implanted in him which makes him almost have superpowers, they are captured by the government of the Hrrrm and retured to Hrrrm where they stand trial and are sentenced to prison.
In book three, the sentence is carried out. Mike, Joe and every other gay person in Hrrrm space are condemned to be stripped of their assets and sent off to a prison world. The prison world is a worthless piece of rock that has failed several times over the last 5,000 years to be successfully colonized.
With very little usable supplies, Mike, Joe and 100 other prisoners are dumped on the planet and told to get it ready for additional prisoners who will be arriving soon. Around Hrrrm space, the Religionist Party, who pushed through the rounding up and imprisonment of all LGBT citizens, begins to do just that by creating huge prison camps in preparation for shipping the undesirables to the prison planet. In some cases those imprisoned LGBT people are being massacred for fighting back. Their deaths are also being used as blackmail against Mike to ensure he cooperates.
Under Mike and Joe’s leadership, the new prison colony not only survives…it begins to flourish. What will happen when the Religionists push even harder for extermination of the LGBTs and of Mike in particular? Can his implant help him, and the colony, survive?
I enjoyed this latest book from Mark Zubro. For any of you not familiar with Mark, he spins real life issues into his tales. He takes modern day American politics and LGBT rights issues and puts them into an intergalactic venue, with sometimes a fairly thin veneer. There is little doubt of his social commentaries.
I would recommend this book as part of the series. It was a good wrap-up of the series, although I would have to say it was my least favorite of the three book series. It was well written, but I felt this one missed out on some character development of the background characters. They felt a little flat in this installment. Overall though I liked the book and the entire series. It is fairly hard sci-fi, with very little sex, but it works.
RATING: 
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