Fulminata reviewed In Death Ground by David Weber
Review of 'In Death Ground' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
TLDR: This story shouldn't need 1300+ pages to tell.
This time the antagonists are an evil alien race that doesn't even think like humans, which means that 99% of this one is going to be told from the side of the Alliance to defeat them. This means no politics, not even any arguments over how best to fight the enemy. We just get battle after battle, interspersed with characters wallowing in the guilt they feel for not having done better. It's not bad, but after 600 pages it gets a bit tedious.
You can imagine how I was looking forward to the end as the page count dwindled, only to find that this was just part one!
That was when I first read the book when it came out in 1997. By the time the next book came out, FIVE YEARS later in 2002, I'd largely stopped reading fiction, and …
TLDR: This story shouldn't need 1300+ pages to tell.
This time the antagonists are an evil alien race that doesn't even think like humans, which means that 99% of this one is going to be told from the side of the Alliance to defeat them. This means no politics, not even any arguments over how best to fight the enemy. We just get battle after battle, interspersed with characters wallowing in the guilt they feel for not having done better. It's not bad, but after 600 pages it gets a bit tedious.
You can imagine how I was looking forward to the end as the page count dwindled, only to find that this was just part one!
That was when I first read the book when it came out in 1997. By the time the next book came out, FIVE YEARS later in 2002, I'd largely stopped reading fiction, and wasn't going to spend my time slogging through another 700+ pages just to finish the story.
So, here I am over 20 years later, and I've re-read it so I can do just that. Why? I'm starting to ask myself the same question. Probably the same reason I read it the first time: Insurrection and Crusade were good enough to get me interested in the setting, and I wanted to read a little more. That's the problem, I wanted to read a little more, not something that literally exceeds the page count of War and Peace!
But what about the 600 plus pages of this first part of two, was there anything there worth reading? If you read and liked the combat descriptions from the earlier books, then there's a lot of that here. In fact, like I mentioned at the beginning, that's pretty much all there is.
In between battles we get characters wallowing in the guilt they feel for having not done any better than they did. Of course the authors make it clear that they did the best anyone could have done, because the military is full of consummate professionals who do exactly the right thing whenever it's called for. Never mind that there's been 60 years of peace, and that the supposedly best leader of them all leads his fleet into a trap that the reader sees coming way before any of these brilliant military leaders do. Sure, we get mentions of a handful of officers with political connections who are no good, but they're all off screen, and so much the exception to the rule that they hardly matter.
We briefly get a caricature of a politician so hilariously one-dimensional that I have to wonder if it was put there just to make the other characters look more well-rounded by comparison. Also, it's here that we once again get the authors' bizarre take on what being a liberal means (it apparently involves being in the top 1% of wealth and sneering at the military).
So, is there anything here worth reading? I hope you like space battles!
