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Kill Ratio
THE ULTIMATE TERRORIST ACT...
Though Man reaches to the stars, he has not forgotten how to hate. Now the lunar headquarters of the United Nations has become the target of a secret terrorist group.
The plague has already been unleashed into the closed lunar complex. A new strain of bioengineered virus, it carefully choses its victims, mercelessly wiping out entire bloodlines.
Only one man can stop it. His name is Sam Yates. A member of the lunar security force, he's seen his share of action in Earth wars. But he's never seen anything like the slaughter that has now begun...
Though Man reaches to the stars, he has not forgotten how to hate. Now the lunar headquarters of the United Nations has become the target of a secret terrorist group.
The plague has already been unleashed into the closed lunar complex. A new strain of bioengineered virus, it carefully choses its victims, mercelessly wiping out entire bloodlines.
Only one man can stop it. His name is Sam Yates. A member of the lunar security force, he's seen his share of action in Earth wars. But he's never seen anything like the slaughter that has now begun...
268 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published October 1, 1987
1 person is currently reading
52 people want to read
About the author
Janet E. Morris
108 books383 followersJanet Ellen Morris (born May 25, 1946) is a United States author. She began writing in 1976 and has since published more than 20 novels, many co-authored with David Drake or her husband Chris Morris. She has contributed short fiction to the shared universe fantasy series Thieves World, and edited the Bangsian fantasy series Heroes in Hell. Most of her work has been in the fantasy and science fiction genres, although she has also written several works of non-fiction.
Morris was elected to the New York Academy of Sciences in 1980.
In 1995, Morris and her husband and frequent co-writer Christopher Morris founded M2 Tech. Since that time, their writing output has decreased in proportion to the success of the company, which works with U.S. federal and military agencies on non-lethal weapon systems and software.
Morris was elected to the New York Academy of Sciences in 1980.
In 1995, Morris and her husband and frequent co-writer Christopher Morris founded M2 Tech. Since that time, their writing output has decreased in proportion to the success of the company, which works with U.S. federal and military agencies on non-lethal weapon systems and software.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 12, 2018
I absolutely loved military science fiction novels when I was teenager. That fondness carried over into college for a couple of years. David Drake was one of my favorite authors during that phase and I read anything that had his name on it. I recall that in the Eighties he was prolific and seemed to have a new book come out every five or six months. Janet Morris was equally productive. "Kill Ratio" seemed like a no-brainer and I eagerly purchased it in the Fall of 1987. A thriller/espionage novel set on the moon. Cool. I don't recall what I thought of it back in 1987 so I read it again. My feelings? Mediocre. It basically reads like so many other pot boilers that were churned out during that time period. The exotic setting doesn't really help all that much. You've got the big studly hero and the two beautiful women who are "capable", but have no problem sleeping with our hero at the drop of the hat. That seemed perfectly correct to my nineteen year old self, but at the age of Fifty it's uncomfortable at best. The novel is really nothing special and the Drake penned action sequences ,that I used to be so impressed with, don't wow like they used to. All in all it earns a big old meh.
Oh well. Onto my next nostalgia read.
Oh well. Onto my next nostalgia read.
June 6, 2015
This is a near-future bio-engineering/terrorism suspense novel set at U.N. headquarters on the moon. It's not a great book, but is fine adventure/entertainment... Drake's solo novels seem edgier and more compelling to me.
March 6, 2008
A bioengineering techno-thriller written with Janet Morris
July 17, 2025
In Kill Ratio, a computer printing a document is described as such:
“A sheet of hard copy fed soundlessly from a slot in the desktop which had been invisible until it disgorged its printed burden.”
What the fuck?
Kill Ratio is one of the most difficult books I’ve ever read. It’s a more challenging read than most classics; it’s more difficult than many philosophical texts. That is because its prose is so utterly insane, so impossibly clunky in its sentence structures and so overwrought in its verbiage that the reader’s eyes slide right off the page. The sentence above stuck out in my mind, mostly because of the absurdity of the phrase “disgorged its printed burden,” but it is not a cherry-picked example of a strange misstep from an otherwise competently written pulp novel. It is an example of what the entire book sounds like. It is a sci-fi potboiler that exists at multiple intersections of style: plucky space jaunt versus hard-bitten procedural, soft versus hard sci-fi, political thriller versus adventure romp, and it is utterly unable to negotiate any of those stylistic elements with any sort of elegance or even basic functionality. Kill Ratio is barely a novel in the most generous sense of the word. From the utterly bizarre, nonsensical premise- elite cabal designs genetically-targeted supervirus to eliminate all the black people in the world- to the inane and disruptive character beats- both female leads reward leading man Sam Yates for his protection by bouncin n doin tricks on it- it is a book that constantly gets in its own way, unable to even function as a mindless power fantasy because it can’t stop describing the fucking material composition of a door long enough to properly illustrate a gunfight.
What happened here? I’d blame the dual-author setup, which ends in disaster far more often than success. It’s hard to tell exactly how it worked out, given that the whole book has the same uniformly incompetent voice, but I imagine that there was some process of repeated “punching up” of the first draft that ultimately obliterated the book. Saying that a writer abused a thesaurus is a sophomoric and cliched criticism, but in this case, it seems quite literally like what occurred: even the simplest sentence or description has been tortured into unreadability. You can kind of see the skeleton underneath if you squint- big dumb space fun, ephemeral but fine as an airplane read- but it’s been so mercilessly overwritten that layer after layer of deranged fat occludes the story underneath almost entirely. The sole element of note that provides some amusement (albeit unintentional) is how 1987 it is, with the laughable implication that whatever major political events of that year would naturally reverberate hundreds of years into the future. The most dangerous terrorists? South African Boer diaspora. The most important wars? Nicaraguan jungle battles. The most notable feature of a woman? How HOT she is. Well, I guess some things really are timeless.
https://hideousrecollection.substack.com
“A sheet of hard copy fed soundlessly from a slot in the desktop which had been invisible until it disgorged its printed burden.”
What the fuck?
Kill Ratio is one of the most difficult books I’ve ever read. It’s a more challenging read than most classics; it’s more difficult than many philosophical texts. That is because its prose is so utterly insane, so impossibly clunky in its sentence structures and so overwrought in its verbiage that the reader’s eyes slide right off the page. The sentence above stuck out in my mind, mostly because of the absurdity of the phrase “disgorged its printed burden,” but it is not a cherry-picked example of a strange misstep from an otherwise competently written pulp novel. It is an example of what the entire book sounds like. It is a sci-fi potboiler that exists at multiple intersections of style: plucky space jaunt versus hard-bitten procedural, soft versus hard sci-fi, political thriller versus adventure romp, and it is utterly unable to negotiate any of those stylistic elements with any sort of elegance or even basic functionality. Kill Ratio is barely a novel in the most generous sense of the word. From the utterly bizarre, nonsensical premise- elite cabal designs genetically-targeted supervirus to eliminate all the black people in the world- to the inane and disruptive character beats- both female leads reward leading man Sam Yates for his protection by bouncin n doin tricks on it- it is a book that constantly gets in its own way, unable to even function as a mindless power fantasy because it can’t stop describing the fucking material composition of a door long enough to properly illustrate a gunfight.
What happened here? I’d blame the dual-author setup, which ends in disaster far more often than success. It’s hard to tell exactly how it worked out, given that the whole book has the same uniformly incompetent voice, but I imagine that there was some process of repeated “punching up” of the first draft that ultimately obliterated the book. Saying that a writer abused a thesaurus is a sophomoric and cliched criticism, but in this case, it seems quite literally like what occurred: even the simplest sentence or description has been tortured into unreadability. You can kind of see the skeleton underneath if you squint- big dumb space fun, ephemeral but fine as an airplane read- but it’s been so mercilessly overwritten that layer after layer of deranged fat occludes the story underneath almost entirely. The sole element of note that provides some amusement (albeit unintentional) is how 1987 it is, with the laughable implication that whatever major political events of that year would naturally reverberate hundreds of years into the future. The most dangerous terrorists? South African Boer diaspora. The most important wars? Nicaraguan jungle battles. The most notable feature of a woman? How HOT she is. Well, I guess some things really are timeless.
https://hideousrecollection.substack.com
February 24, 2018
An illegally engineered virus is tested on the well-populated Moon base. It escapes it's bounds but works as designed. Three unlikely people decide to take it upon themselves to find the people who caused it,
A medical horror/action story in space. The characters felt almost all like caricatures. More descriptively violent than I prefer, and also not a fan of the torture scene, which made no sense with the vague sex scene later.
A medical horror/action story in space. The characters felt almost all like caricatures. More descriptively violent than I prefer, and also not a fan of the torture scene, which made no sense with the vague sex scene later.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews