Tor, Copyright 2010, 522
pages
ISBN: 978-0-7653-6381-7
Read: January 2012, at
age 33
This is a stand-alone
book, which is kind of rare in sci-fi/fantasy. Or maybe it's the start of a new series. I don't know. It's relatively self-contained, anyway. It’s a near-future story about an alien invasion.
From the back cover:
Earth is conquered. The Shongairi have arrived in force, and
humanity’s cities lie in radioactive ruins.
In mere minutes, more than half the human race has died.
Master Sergeant Stephen
Buchevsky, who thought he was being rotated
home from his latest tour in Afghanistan, finds himself instead prowling
the back country of the Balkans, dodging alien patrols and trying to organize
scattered survivors without getting killed.
And in the southeastern United States, firearms instructor and former
Marine Dave Dvorak finds himself at the center of a growing network of
resistance – putting his extended family at lethal risk, but what else can he
do?
On the face of it,
Buchevsky’s and Dvorak’s chances look bleak, as do prospects for the rest of the
surviving human race. But it may well be
that Shongairi and the Hegemony alike have underestimated the inhabitants of
that strange planet called Earth….
Well,
the back cover’s not terribly accurate, but it’s mostly in details that it’s
wrong. Dvorak’s IMMEDIATE family is at
risk, for instance – we never hear about his extended family. And the aliens didn’t nuke the cities, they
hit them with kinetic bombardment. I’m
not sure that that leaves radioactive waste.
Overall, I guess it’s a reasonable summary. It doesn't let you in on the big reveal which the hardcover dust jacket copy does, apparently, so if you want spoilers, take a look at that.
Reactions after the break:
One Good Thing:
It was an interesting study in helping to
understand why people use terrorism – when you’re not strong, then you need to
fight dirty.
One Bad Thing:
I don’t need to be continually bombarded with
each weapon’s specs. It’s wonderful that
the author knows the muzzle speed of all the weapons used, but really, I don’t
need to.
Overall:
This book tries to do a lot of things. It starts with very much the same principle
as some of the more recent John Ringo books that I’ve read – Last Centurion,
Ghost – where a far-right wing-nut (or three) gets his survivalist and guns kicks, and
morphs into a discussion as to why people resort to “dishonorable” guerrilla
warfare, with some pretty heavy-handed parallels to the recent Iraq and
Afghanistan conflicts. Then there’s a
deus ex machina to close it out. The
book does a lot of things well - the action scenes were particularly vivid - but it fails in a lot of places as well.
I didn’t like some of the conclusions in the
book – I thought that considering the reasonable response to a war of conquest
as being genocide was a bit much, for instance.
I also thought the book was overly human-exceptionalist, as are most of
this type of book, but I keep waiting for a first-contact book where
human-types are something that *has* been seen before by the aliens, or where *they*
are exceptionally fast learners. Aliens
where balkanization is the norm, and entire cultures don’t speak with one voice
per galactic empire. This isn’t that
book.
I liked the book better than the breakdown would suggest – somehow the whole was
better than the disparate parts.
Rating: 3
Characters:
By the end of the book, I still didn’t really
know much of anything about the characters.
They seemed more like game-pieces than people, and I had trouble
keeping them straight, since all our 'heroes' were pretty much the same guy. The most
interesting character was the alien xenobiologist tasked with figuring out
those crazy humans, in addition to all her other tasks. Other than that, though, the aliens all
blended together into a long string of individuals that got a couple of pages in the limelight and then got shot. A lot of the humans
got shot, too – so many died early on that it took a while before I even
realized who we were eventually going to follow. Generally, just cardboard cutouts of
characters with simple motivations that were often explicitly stated.
Also – the aliens weren’t really that alien: the
psychologies were basically taken from earth-animals and overlaid on a common
tech base. It made for some interesting
points, and I thought it worked fairly well.
Setting:
Earth, before and during an alien invasion. I could rarely tell where we were based on
the descriptions. I guess it didn’t
matter – everywhere was pretty much shades of “major centers obliterated” and “sniping
from the countryside”.
Readability:
After most of the characters were bombed out of
existence, the story was much more readable.
The language was straightforward and suited the story, but there seemed
to be too many viewpoints to handle, especially early on, and as a result the beginning was a bit of
a mess. Later in the book, things
simplified somewhat, and the story began to make more sense.
Plot:
The plot was pretty simple – aliens bomb the
tar out of earth, the earthlings refuse to surrender, fighting until their
last breaths, and then the deus ex machina comes to save the day. There was sufficient foreshadowing so that
the ending wasn’t completely out of the blue, but it was still kind of weak. From a story perspective, I would
have liked to see humanity succeed against overwhelming odds, and there were
ways that I could see for it to have happened.
Alas, no.
Other Opinions:
Interesting that he thought that the beginning worked well,
opposite to me.
“...who doesn’t love a story about plucky human resistance
fighters kicking alien canine ass?”
Nicely written review – better than mine – but pretty much says the same thing.
Nicely written review – better than mine – but pretty much says the same thing.
Here’s someone who liked it a lot.
Another positive one.
Nicely snarky, yet thoughtful.
No comments:
Post a Comment