"We must kill the enemy without mercy!" - one way to write military SF
Written: Nov 30 '05 (Updated Nov 30 '05)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: An unashamed tribute to warriors who will exterminate the evil enemy if necessary.
Cons: See Pros. Either you like this sort of thing, or you don't.
The Bottom Line: Lots of technobabble about the futuristic military hardware, if you love that stuff. If you prefer stories that don't assume "exterminating the enemy" could be necessary, give it a miss.
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| lorendiac's Full Review: David Weber and Steve White - In Death Ground |
But the nasal platitudes wouldn’t go away. “And besides,” Wister bleated on, “as all civilized beings recognize, violence never settles anything. . . .”
All at once, Avram decided she’d had enough. Carried beyond a certain point, stupidity was personally offensive to her. “Tell that to the Confederate States of America and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, Assemblywoman Wister,” she cut in. “If, that is, you can find them.”
Wister looked blank – the Liberal-Progressive Party that ruled Nova Terra had long since reduced the teaching of history to an elective. Obviously Wister had never so elected, and she had no idea what Avram was talking about.
The basic situation, as established in the early chapters of In Death Ground: The Terran Federation Navy has just made First Contact with an intelligent, spacefaring, insectlike species, eventually labeled the Bugs. The Bugs opened the festivities by firing off lots and lots of missiles, and things went downhill from there. Humanity (and three species of allies who get involved later) would be perfectly willing to negotiate boundaries and leave it at that - but no dice! The Bugs are really, really, really evil.
Their grasp of cultural diversity is: “Those people are not like us, therefore we must kill them!”
Their grasp of negotiating strategy is: “They own habitable planets that we want for ourselves. Let’s kill them!”
Their grasp of how to deal with civilian populations in an area they've just overrun, after wiping out the military defenders, is: “Don’t they look delicious?”
So the moral lines between Good and Evil in this story are so sharply drawn that only a fool who is Congenitally Incapable of Ever Getting a Clue could possibly fail to perceive that the Enemy is really and truly Evil.
Case in point: Assemblywoman Bettina Wister, an unkind stereotype of the "extreme liberal politician" mentality, quoted at the top of this review. In a later scene, even after video footage is displayed which shows Bugs treating human children as tasty meat snacks, Wister continues to argue that this war was never necessary in the first place - paranoid professional military types must have somehow provoked this civilized alien species into doing things it otherwise would not have wanted to do. (It wasn't the human military who fired the first shots without warning, but Wister never lets facts interfere with her opinions. I somehow suspect the co-authors, David Weber and Steve White, have an ideological ax to grind. I could be wrong.)
Nevertheless, eventually the political decision is made to wage total warfare on the Bugs until they have been exterminated.
The military officers who function as major viewpoint characters are generally presented in a very positive light. And usually with enough nasty problems facing them to arouse sympathy on the part of the reader. More than once, admirals find it necessary to withdraw the available forces from an inhabited solar system in order to prepare to hold the line at a strategic bottleneck further back - even if this means large civilian populations will perforce be abandoned to the nonexistent "mercies" of the Bug invaders. The sort of ugly life-and-death decisions that I'm just as glad my current job doesn't require me to make. (These people are no cowards - other officers head into battle against overwhelming odds, certain they'll die, if they think they can buy enough time to make a difference strategically.)
Allowing for the type of novel this is, my major complaint is that it ends in the middle of the big war - but there is nothing on the covers or title page that warns you that this is only the first half of a complete story. It was published in 1997; six years later the authors finally got around to providing the sequel that wrapped things up.
This has been a Lean-n-Mean Review.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
lorendiac
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Location: Indianapolis
Reviews written: 148
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About Me:
"Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories." (Arthur C. Clarke)
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