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Dread Empire's Fall: The Praxis
So it's a damn, damn shame that DEF:tP feels like it's written by Weber, because I really like Walter Jon Williams. I liked his cyberpunkish Hardwired and Voice of the Whirlwind. I liked his fantasy City on Fire and Metropolitan. I really liked his story of how a culture may select Gods to manage the most dangerous of technologies (Aristoi), and I thought his comedies (The Crown Jewels, Rock of Ages, and House of Shards) were, well, just damn funny.
I don't know what happened here, other than maybe Williams has Weber's arm up his ass -- that's the only explanation I can come up for this book.
The background, at least, is somewhat interesting: The Shaa, an alien race, have subjugated everyone around them for thousands of years to the point where nobody even thinks of the concept of rebellion -- everyone's been assimilated into the Shaa empire. This includes the Terrans (whose process of subjugation is the cause of the naming of the battleships Bombardment of Los Angeles, Bombardment of Delhi, Bombardment of Buenos Aires, and a few others) and the Naxid, who were the first race to be subjugated by the Shaa. The Naxid, by the way, are insectile (or insectoid, as the book prefers to call them). As everyone knows, insectile creatures are inherently evil. You'll be happy to know that one of the other races, the Torminels, is a race of nocturnals hunters, with "a plump and furry body." As is appropriate for teddy bears, the Torminels appear to be relatively harmless but when pushed are discovered to be ferocious and honorable fighters. Gotta love the Ewoks!
Anyway, back to the story: Everyone's living in harmony. Unfortunately, the Shaa, who are functionally immortal, have been slowly suiciding because, well, they're bored, and finally the last Shaa kills himself. Will the perfect order his race forced the universe into remain unchanged as he wished? Don't count on it.
Remember the Naxid? They're insectile (sorry, insectoid), and so do the only thing that an insectile (or insectoid) race is allowed in sci-fi books: They try to take over. All the other races band together to try to beat them. Apparently, Dread Empire's Fall will be the saga of that war. Thousands will fight, and millions will die. No one knows who will live and who will die. Anyone's life could be snuffed out at the next moment.
Well, as long as we define "anyone" to be "not Gareth Martinez or Caroline Sula." See, Gareth Martinez (who, by the way, is tall and considered handsome by some, very intelligent, and is cursed by a provincial accent and a lowly birth that means he just gets no respect) is one of our two protagonists. And Caroline Sula, described as "pale, nearly translucent skin, emerald-green eyes, white-gold hair worn collar-length ... Martinez threw the picture into 3D and rotated it, and Sula didn't have a single bad angle" is also very, very smart. Caroline, by the way, has a nasty little secret that you'll be very, very surprised to have revealed to you if you've been recently lobotomized and consequently not figured it out fairly early in the book.
Anyway, The Praxis covers the death of the last Shaa (whose name is Anticipation of Victory, by the way. Normally referred to by everyone as Vic, I'm sure, unless his mother was very angry at which point I'm sure it was "Anticipation of Victory you clean your room RIGHT NOW!") and the beginning of the take-over attempt by the Naxid. You'll be delighted to know that Martinez figures out what they're up to, but nobody listens to him, so he only manages to save one ship. And then, against overwhelming odds, manages to escape. You'll be delighted to find out that our heroine, Caroline Sula, when put in her own precarious position (not to blow the plot, but it involves overwhelming odds against her and almost certain death) manages to do PHENOMENALLY well. Really, she becomes quite the hero. No, wait, why is everyone laughing?
Gareth and Caroline, by the way, hook up very briefly but due to Caroline's little secret not much comes of it and she runs away to ignore him for approximately 400 pages until, three pages before the ending of the book, she sends him a note that basically says "Wow, you and I are both the heroes of this saga and so are destined to be incredibly lucky. Wanna hook up?" No, I'm not really embellishing this much.
The aforementioned 400 pages pass by relatively quickly (how quickly? I bought the book approximately ten hours ago, and have spent much of the intervening time having dinner with my family, downloading p^Hdrivers from the net, and writing this minireview). They are filled with one-dimensional characterizations (see this good-for-nothing non-com? Don't worry about him -- he'll be good-for-nothing until the last drop. This tough but incredibly smart retired weapons chief? Good guy. You can trust him not to screw up. Ever. This aristocracy Captain who likes soccer more than having a functional warship? Go ahead and write him off) and questionable strategic thinking.
Williams does throw some interesting twists into the DEF universe. The Shaa empire is ruled by the laws of The Praxis, the major religion everyone's bought into. The Praxis forbids most of the more interesting uses of technology -- bioengineering is forbidden, as is AI. FTL weapons are non-existent and FTL travel is done only through wormholes. This means that when dealing with intrasolar warfare, the main weapons are missiles. However, because missiles can't be controlled by AI, and because communication can't be FTL, the further away the missiles are from you (and the closer to the enemy), the less able you are to control them. Hence, missiles are shepherded by pinnaces, small one-person ships. Typically, a pinnace controls a volley of missiles and flies with them toward the enemy. If the pinnace pilot is very lucky and very good, they even survive, though most people don't think of this much as the last conflict the Shaa empire had (before this upcoming rebellion) was 3400 hundred years ago and lasted six days. Aside from wormhole travel, all other tech is decidedly hard sci-fi -- lasers and missiles, and both explosive and propulsion power is provided by simple anti-matter. Acceleration couches are an important fixture on ships. In fact, acceleration plays a pretty important role in most of the battles (and Williams makes one of the races both supreme tacticians and incapable of anything more than 2G. OK, that's different).
Really, though, there's nothing there to redeem the one-dimensional characters, the simplistic prose, the improbable odds our heroes manage to slog through with great distinction, and the waste of your time. If you like Weber's Harrington series, you probably want to check it out. If you're the sort of Walter Jon Williams fan who simply has to read everything he writes, your decision will be clear. As to the rest of you ... stay away.
In case you're interested, Williams has a homepage.
You can purchase Dread Empire's Fall: The Praxis from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
As encouraged by Baen Books, don't blow a wad of money on the Honor Harrington books until you know you are going to like them. How do you know? You read them for free on my website. :)
http://baen.ghostwheel.com/
_IF_ you get hooked, then buy the books.
-Chris
-- This sig is only a test. If this were a real sig it would say something witty. --
Obviously you've never read any of Alan Dean Foster's Commonwealth novels - the primary 2 races of the Commonwealth are human and thranx, who are insectiod.
AND the thranx are a damn sight "nicer" than the humans.
AND they aren't a "hive mind" or any of that crap - they are individuals.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Amazon (without the gratuitous Slashdot referral bonus - indeed, without ANY referral bonus - AND from a good bookstore).
All of the Books Baen gives away for free can be found at the Baen Free Library.
David Weber, the Honor Harrington series consists of:
Book 1: On Basilisk Station
Book 2: Honor of the Queen
Book 3: A Short Victorious War
Book 4: Field of Dishonor
Book 5: Flag in Exile
Book 6: Honor Among Enemies
Book 7: In Enemy Hands
Book 8: Echoes of Honor
Book 9: Ashes of Victory
Book 10: War of Honor
The upside to "In Death Ground" is that the next book I'm reading seems wonderful.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Maybe this is his newest book in the USA, over here the sequel is already out: The Sundering (got that link of WJW's page).
I find myself agreeing with much of the review (cardboard cutout characters getting killed or surviving in predictable ways), but at the same time I really enjoyed the book. I particularly liked the way that, since the Shaa had restricted various sorts of tech, you could zap around between stars at FTL via the fixed wormholes, but once in a system were stuck with relativistic physics (and no nanotechnology or AI to help out).
One point I think the review missed - the reason that the characters manage to survive against vastly superior odds is that neither side have any idea how to conduct a space battle - no enemy apart from the Shaa has a fleet of any size or control of the wormholes, so all the actions in the illustrious thousands-year history of the grand Shaa spacefleet have basicallly been bombarding planets into submission from orbit. This is brought out more in the sequel.
Could have lived without the rant about the series by a different author (but I haven't read the Honor Harrington stuff so maybe it was relevant).
-- Nothing unusual happened today
this is a little offtopic but no more so than the rant at the beginning of this book review, which reminded me of the worst book/author ever.
The worst book ever: Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen Donaldson
This is the worst peice of crap ever published (and I have been known to enjoy books based on the game DOOM). The main character is a middle aged leper of all things, who is the most despicable character in the whole story. Starting at about page 2, I was hoping someone would come along and put him out of his misery. The character is filled with self pity and has no heroic qualities at all. At the pinnicle of his despicability, he actually rapes a teenaged girl who saves his life early in the story. It seemed to me that the author thought it would be OK for the main character to be a self-pitying rapist with no moral fiber. On top of that, the entire story is a complete rip off of the LOTR trilogy, except that near the end, our main character finds himself back in suburbia wondering if the whole thing was a dream. It's just badly written, I couldn't read the whole thing once I found out the main character does not die the bloody, painful death he deserves. Since then, I have stayed away from cheap paperback sci-fi and fantasy. I hope my brain is never again tainted by the scribblings of talentless human typewriters.
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Sorry to all y'all who are bashing this review, but it's spot-on. I read this book, and it was a betrayal. Very cool universe, good writing style, but the substance was... bland. Pasty. Not satisfying at all.
Problem is, for really bad books, it's hard to be insightful in a review without sounding like a whiner. But this book does *just suck*, and as long as everyone who reads the review takes that point home at the end, it has done its job.
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Space opera is also Banks, Simmons, Renyolds, Vinge or any of a half dozen other authors who can write complex, involved plots with great characters and subtle themes.
Harrington, Star Wars and similar stuff is more properly pulp SF
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
I enjoyed the Honor Harrington books. You might, too, if you enjoy reading about heroic people doing heroic things. Honor Harrington is a heroic character: she isn't perfect, but she feels a strong sense of duty and does her best to do her duty. And her best turns out to be very good indeed.
If you are at all interested in the Honor Harrington books, check out the Baen Free Library. The first book is On Basilisk Station. (That link is to the HTML version; there are several downloadable versions as well.)
Take a look and decide for yourself whether these books are for you.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Because it's Horatio Hornblower in space.
It isn't a coincidence that the main chacter serves in the "Royal Navy" and is fighting against an enemy that very strongly resembles France. Or that the title character's initials are HH.
There are strong similarities between the sagas of Hornblower and Harrington as well as between the Napoleonic Wars and Harringtons universe.
Harrington herself is a mixture of Nelson, Hornblower and Weber's own twist on the character, complete with space navy (Royal Navy), dastardly empire building opposition (France) and injuries parallel to those of Nelson (loss of eye and arm).
The latest in the main series has also opened the plot for a scandalous love affair with the consent of the other party's spouse (Nelson again)
Weber has indicated though that the plot will start to show more divergence from the events of the Napoleonic wars from this point on. Harrington (I think) will still probably die in her greatest hour destroying the enemy fleet when the series finally wraps up.
Frankly, though, there's a lot of bad SF out there that deserves to be trashed - it's only made because pre-pubescent scient-oriented teenage boys will read anything (well, except for most good stuff.)
One comment though: the Thranx, and insectoid race in Alan Dean Foster's Flinx & Commonwealth series, are actually more noble, peace-loving, and rational than humans. Less stinky too.
(Of course, Alan Dean Foster has really sunk to the level of the type of books that you're talking about, and his SF has never been really hard ... or even logical ... but he used to have a few good books now and then. But at least here's one example of an insect race being very good.)
... of the Galaxy Rangers! You've reminded me that I have to find and re-read that wonderful Harry Harrison book. He knows how to take his space-opera spoofing seriously.
Well, apparently, you only have to fool the majority of people for a little while.