Into the Looking Glass - John Ringo

Baen, 2005, 366 pages
ISBN: 978-1-4165-2105-1
Read: November 2014

Book 1 of Looking Glass

In which the Ringo superman protagonist fights off an invasion by the Zerg... er... Dreen, with help from the advanced, religious Protoss... er... Adar.

From the back cover:

When a 60 kiloton explosion destroys the University of Central Florida, terrorism is the first suspect.  But terrorists don't generally leave doorways to another world in their wake.

With time of the essence, the Secretary of Defense scrounges up the nearest physicist with a high level security clearance.  With doctorates in everything from nuclear physics to electrical engineering, William Weaver, PhD, is the egghead's egghead.  On the other hand, with skills in everything from mountain biking to screaming electric guitar, he's also fast enough and tough enough to survive when the alien gates start disgorging "demons."

As a snap decision, he appears to be the perfect choice: smart, tough, and capable.  Now if he could only get his boss off his back and get his cellphone bill paid.  Oh, yeah, and figure out why the heck these gates keep opening.

As the gates spread and evil aliens spread with them, it is up to Weaver and SEAL Command Master Chief Miller to find a way to stop the proliferation and close the hostile gates.  The problem being that the only way they can see to save the Earth is destroy it.  Then there's not going to be any more girlfriends or cellphones or bosses...

Okay, two out of those three are bad.  Gotta prioritize.  Guess Weaver and Miller are just gonna have to save the world.

Kind of misleading back cover copy, but gets the tone all right.

Reactions after the break.  There are probably spoilers.

Overall:

By this point, I've got a pretty good idea what's coming when I crack open a Ringo novel.  There'll be explosions.  Mayhem.  A redneck conservative hero.  Some less-than-politically-correctness.  Some gun porn.  Women described by bust size.  And a quick-paced, entertaining read.  That was all there.  There was also a lot of theoretical physics, and the book fell apart for me through there.  I think this book couldn't decide whether it was a BDO (big dumb object) intellectual thriller or a straight-up action thriller, and didn't end up doing either particularly well.

Rating: 2

Setting:

The book was set on Earth, circa 2005.  This was from the time the Large Hadron Collider was being built, and I remember some uneasiness about  how they might make, for instance, a black hole, and destroy the earth.  We run with that theory.  The sub-atomic-partical theories advanced didn't particularly ring true, but I don't tend to read Ringo when I'm looking for deep thought about big ideas.  Unfortunately, we kept coming back to the theoretical physics and hand-waving through them.  It became distracting.

Also distracting was that the book was basically Starcraft, with the Zerg breaking through to Earth.  There were many, many parallels.  To wit:  The Dreen (Zerg) were all bio-based, hive-minded, and had dog-sized vicious infantry (Zerglings), bigger things that spat thorns (Hydralisks), spread out this fungus where they were setting up camp (creep) and so on.  The perfect metaphor falls apart with some of the higher-level units, but it's pretty close overall.

The Protoss, er, Adar are pretty much the same as well - vaguely humanoid, advanced technology blended with religion.  Yeah.

Plot:
So some guy blows up much of Florida, and in the process sets up an interplanetary gate generator.  Aliens invade.  Explosions ensue.  Conveniently, the aliens are just weak enough that human tech is viable against them.  Eventually, the good guys win.  The plot was sufficient.

Characters:
Hmm.. Where there characters?  I read the whole book, and I don't really have a picture of either of the main characters as people.  They were more floating points of view, with the occasional infodump whenever we needed to know a bit more about the physics of what was happening.  I don't actually think we needed to know more about the physics.  That could have been background, and not a main character randomly spouting off whatever brilliant thing he had just come up with that would almost invariably be proven right.

Readability:
This was the area where I was disappointed the most:  I'm not overly surprised by flat characters or predictable plotting, but I was expecting a fast easy read.  Instead, it was choppy, hard to follow, and the characters all blended together.  There were fun moments, but overall it didn't work very well for me.

Other Opinions:
IGN
Liked it better than I did, but saw many of the same issues.

SFRevu
Compares Ringo to Heinlein.  I disagree - Heinlein was all about the characters, while Ringo is much much less so.