Blaine Lee Pardoe has been a contributor to the BattleTech universe for many years, first working on sourcebooks and then on novels. Surrender Your Dreams is his second MechWarrior: Dark Age novel, and in my opinion, an improvement on the first.

Where Target of Opportunity seemed to be divided into two halves, the first plot, the second combat, there was none of that here; Surrender was well-paced throughout, doing a good job of interspersing character moments with action. While the chapter organization was... unusual, in the end I think that it was to the book's benefit. Rather than simply being three novellas, it let the reader compare and contrast the different stories, see how each person was affected by similar events.

I liked that we got a deeper look at Damien Redburn; even though he's the former Exarch of the Republic, no longer in power, I've always thought that he needed some fleshing out. Here, after his "retirement", we get that. We also get something that was missing at the end of Fortress Republic: hope that things might just turn out okay after all. Even though we aren't privy to it, there's definitely the feeling that there's a plan at work here. It's not just the Fortress that will be working to save the Republic, but those outside it (as we see over the course of the novel).

Surrender Your Dreams is the first book to really deal with the consequences of the declaration of Fortress Republic. Blaine really hammered home just what the declaration meant for the other nine Prefectures now without a nation. With luck, this won't be the last we'll see of the efforts to save the Republic from itself… ( )