Monster Hunter Memoirs: Sinners by John Ringo and Larry Correia

Either of these authors, on their own, can twist a pretty darned good yarn, but when Ringo gets the opportunity to write in Correia's world...look out! I have definitely noticed that the gratuitous sex for which Ringo was known in his Ghost series is only mentioned here, and never explicit, which may be a sop to Correia's morals and sensibilities, but it doesn't take much away from the story.

Chad "Iron Hand" has to leave Seattle suddenly, a few steps ahead of vengeful trailer park elves, and gets reassigned to MHI in the Big Easy, New Orleans. Monster hunting in New Orleans is an order of magnitude crazier than most other places in the country, which is a pretty good summation of the city in a number of ways, but the amount of "hoodoo" going on seems to bring out more, bigger, badder beasties.

From swarms of giant poisonous frogs to carnivorious crawdads, Chad and the MHI team really earn their PUFF bounties. Chad acquires a gentleman's gentleman, buys a home, and both gains and loses new friends over the course of the book, including a centuries-old vampire known simply as Jack, who seems to have a proprietary interest in the city, and may prove to be an uneasy ally against the recent invasion of zombie-come-latelies.

I'm not certain whether it will come to a climax in the next installment, but there's definitely the groundwork laid in this book for a confrontation with some deeper force or forces causing the monster outbreaks in New Orleans, where the combination of amateur and professional conjurers has made it far easier for the supernatural to gain entry.

Monster Hunter: Grunge by John Ringo

Oh my word! Ringo does Monster Hunters! What fun! I can't hardly think of a better person to write in Correia's universe...well, maybe Drake or Weber.

Chad is a hard core Marine, who joined the Corps to irritate his liberal, hippie parents, but who really became an excellent warrior along the way. When he is killed in the Beirut barracks bombing, he is given a choice by a guy named Peter - go back to Earth to do the Big Guy's works, or take the easy way out and pass on to his final reward (as the song says, probably guarding the streets of Heaven). Of course, it woulda been a really short story if he had taken the easy way, now, wouldn't it?

After his medical retirement from the Marine Corps, he spies a sign for a tent revival, and decides to check it out. When the revival is interrupted by a resurrection - of a whole bunch of zombies - Chad destroys all the Zulus and gets "read in" to the truth about monsters, and gets offered employment with Shackleford's MHI.

After Parris Island, Chad never wants to work in a hot, humid area again, so he opts to take a job in Seattle, and settles in hunting down zombies, wights, liches, vampires, werewolves, ogres... and anything else that makes a habit of taking human victims.

There's a really funny scene in here where Ringo exploits the idea of the blue screen of death, when daemons are climbing out of the monitors in the sub-basement at "Microtel".

Not nearly as many graphic sex scenes as we're used to with Ringo, and Correia must have done some fairly extensive editing. He mentions in the forward that he had to tell JR, "hey, my kids read this stuff!" All of the raunchy stuff takes place offstage, in the dark, as the moon passes behind a cloud.

The whole books is written as if Chad is putting together an instruction manual for noob monster hunters. He gives advice on different monster species that one should befriend, in order to have confidential informants; like Harry Dresden pays the pixies for information with pizza, Chad pays the gnolls (who dwell in the sewers) with rotten, smelly fish - which they love, and the sasquatch get Hersheys kisses.

Good fun, and there's a sequel coming!

Strands of Sorrow by John Ringo

 Ringo mentions in the intro to this book that he had intended to end the series with the previous book, Islands of Rage and Hope. I don't recall it seeming to me like a good stopping point at its conclusion, and I'm not certain that this one was much better - still far too much work to be done to clear the U.S. and the world, but I suppose that series could go on longer than the Posleen War, if Ringo had the ambition, or needed the cash, eh?

The leaders of Wolf Squadron make the tactical decision to clear the coastlines of the U.S. focusing on naval bases around San Diego and Jacksonville. We have plenty of descriptions of Faith and Sophia using their zombie killing and helicopter piloting skills to turn zombie hordes into zombie sludge. I think Ringo may have anticipated the Super Bowl's "Like a Girl" campaign quite nicely.

Focus continues to remain on Lt. Faith's conflicts with regular officers and NCOs who don't understand that the world has changed, and that their pre-apocalypse attitudes and tactics simply won't work. We barely see anything from the point of view of the adults in the story, and the girls' mom has done a full Houdini.

Ringo introduces some new characters, just long enough to have them show us some interesting aspect of the process of taking back America, and then drops them, never to appear again.

Hoping Ringo goes back to writing Ghost stories, or perhaps picks up the saga of Troy Rising or Wands. Or, heaven forbid, maybe he's reached that point in his writing where he has nothing new left to say - that would be a pity.

Islands of Rage and Hope by John Ringo

 Too much of the early going in Islands is devoted to the struggle Faith is having with acting as a Marine Lieutenant, being a 13 year old girl, mind you. Of course, after any marine sees her in battle, their respect for her borders on hero worship, so Ringo could have foregone all of this angst and moved the plot along a little more swiftly. The second flaw for me in this book was that the whole plot feels like a big wargame, "if we had to retake the entire world after a zombie apocalypse, where would be the best place to start, given the resources stipulated, etc." When the strategy gaming overwhelms the zombie killing, then you've really lost most of what holds my interest in this series. Third, for whatever reason, Ringo decided that the results of "what happens in the compartment..." would be a couple thousand pregnancies, and combined that with the statistics on pre-modern medicine mother and infant mortality, and devoted a big chunk of plot time to our heroes figuring out how to minimize the damages - the jury remains out at the end of the book.

That said, once things got rolling in the latter third of the book, there was plenty of whack-a-zombie for everyone. We finally get to find out who "Walker" was in his previous life, which is cool, too. I got to thinking about about Ringo's basic premises here, that there would be no land-based cities still active after a zombie plague, and while I get the idea of limiting the Vs in multi POV, here, I think it likely that there would be far more survivors in some of the rural areas, given their lesser dependency on technology in the first place, the lesser population density, and the fact that a ton of heartlanders have thousands of rounds of ammo for the guns to which they bitterly cling.

Anyway, I was glad I didn't pay over $20 to add this book to the collection, but borrowed it from the local library. I'm interested to see where the story goes next, but I hope it goes there without so much ado about nothing, this time.

To Sail a Darkling Sea by John Ringo

 I don't know what anyone else's beef with John Ringo is, but my major complaint is that reading his novels always leaves me short on sleep, after I keep pushing myself past my bedtime - they're just that much fun! Listen, there's nothing earthshattering in the second book in his Black Tide Rising series, it's mostly more of the same, focusing on the next steps in rescuing survivors of the zombie plague on the high seas, and sending the zombies themselves to Davy Jones' Locker (no, not the guy from the Partridge Family, kids).

The POV in this book bounces around a little bit, as we get to know a few new characters, but mostly remains focused on the Smith family, especially Faith, then Sophia, Captain Steve, and very little about Mom Stacey. The flotilla makes its way to the Canary Islands to avoid hurricane season in the Caribbean, and proceeds to liberate a number of boats, destroy massive zombie hordes, and rescue plague survivors. Once hurricane season is over, Smith plans to take the fleet back to Guantanamo and try to clear all zombies from the area, so he can take over the old U.S. Marine base facilities to try to manufacture vaccines for the plague.

He has the full backing, for what it's worth, of the remaining U.S. command authority holed up in the Rockies somewhere, and the full attention of the submarine crews in the Atlantic, who have so far been isolated from the mutated virus which caused the plague, and dare not leave their boats until a vaccine is widely available.

One of the points that Ringo seems to be making here is that there are some people who are simply natural born killers. They are simply not affected by the same sort of weakening emotions as other people, are somewhat sociopathic in certain areas, and are simply able to turn off their fear and wade right into battle. I think he gives the subject some play in the Paladin of Shadows series, as well. Faith is seriously a warrior woman, even at age 13, and her sister Sophia is not all that far behind. Both of the girls are given (earn, really) commissions as officers for the duration of the crisis, and have to learn the skills to lead others who aren't stone cold trigger tigers.

There are some frank discussions of rank and discipline issues regarding any armed forces, post-plague economics, and strategies and tactics for saving the world. We've seen some of this in the Troy Rising series, so this particular series is very much a wedding of two of Ringo's favorite themes.

Lots of battle, some serious partying, and mostly just good clean, though bloody fun!

Under a Graveyard Sky by John Ringo

 A typical Ringo caper, aside from the lack of graphic sex, but there's plenty of grue and gore to make up for it. A synthetic virus has been released worldwide by malefactors unknown, which begins with flu-like symptoms, highly contagious, and proceeds to neurological effects, turning people into naked, shambling, ravening hulks, whose bites are also very contagious, and rapidly the world is facing the big ZA. One family of preppers gets early warning about the onslaught of zombies and rapidly evacuates from the mainland to a sailboat they have purchased in a hurry. The father, Steve, is an ex-special forces Aussie expat, and his wife, Stacey, is a competent engineer (shades of Heinlein's female characters). Their elder daughter, Sophia (knowledge) is a bit on the geeky side, and does a stint as a lab tech for a private entity creating a vaccine for its executives and their families and key personnel, while the younger daughter, Faith, is more of a gun geek, and turns into a zombie killing machine extraordinaire.

I feel like Ringo spends far too much time simply setting the scene for this tale. It starts fast, but then bogs down for a while while he recounts what's happening at the semi-evil megacorporation, the CDC, NYPD, and so forth. Of course, if Steve and his family didn't hang around the harbor and allow Sophia to work with the ex-CDC scientist developing the vaccine, they might not have the information about the methodology to trade later on in the book. There's also a great scene when the family and some security folks go out for dinner at a mafia hangout for one last Italian meal in NYC and end up doing a big Escape from New York routine, cutting their way through the hordes with full and semi-auto weaponry.

Once they're on the high seas, the "meat" of the tale begins to unfold, and we get a glimpse of where Ringo intends to take the series. Not sure why he's taking a hiatus from the science fiction Troy Rising series he was writing, but perhaps he's just cashing in on the zombie craze while it's hot and will get back to it when things cool down. We'll see how the zombie killing action holds up over time before rendering judgement on this one.

No Way!!

Unbelievable! Ringo does Zombies! eARC available on baen.com for Under a Graveyard Sky. I'll probably wait for the official Nook version, but I just had to share it with y'all.

Tiger by the Tail by John Ringo and Ryan Sear

It all begins so simply, with a training mission for some of the Keldara warriors replacing the many lost in the battle against the Chechen insurgents. Mike Jenkins and his chief of staff, Adams, have chosen as their final exam the task of taking back a freighter from a group of pirates near Malaysia, then destroying their home base. All of this goes relatively smoothly, except that his team takes captive a "prostitute" being abused by the pirates, and discovers a locked case full of motherboards designed to control nuclear power plants in the pirates' treasure.

Though it takes Mike a while to figure it out, it seemed obvious to me before it was revealed in the book that the prostitute, Soon Yi, was a secret agent in deep cover for Chinese intelligence, tracking down the stolen motherboards for her government. After Mike contacts his friends at the highest levels of the U.S. government, he is asked to find out where the motherboards were going, ultimately, and get that information back to U.S. Intelligence. So begins the adventure through Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Myanmar and other fun places in the Far East. Mike's team takes on gangsters, the police, a rogue Chinese general and even the military forces of a sovereign nation.

Plenty of graphic action, both military and sexual. Sear's addition to the writing team seems to add a bit more "documentary" style to things - each time Mike's team lands in a new locale, we get a couple of pages of background on the country, city or political unit, and there seems to be more detail about the capability of various weapons used by Mike and others. Not the best novel in the series, by a long shot, but not as poor as some reviews would have you believe. Hold out for the paperback before you spend the money.

Queen of Wands by John Ringo

I liked much of the same aspects of this story as the first novel about Barbara Everette, soccer mom turned supernatural warrior, and I disliked most of the same things, as well. Barb is the only member of the Foundation for Love and Universal Faith (FLUF) who is a born-again, bible thumping, fundamentalist Christian. The rest of the group who fight against the manifestations of evil worldwide are pagans. Ringo even gives Barb a monologue to spout as she and a group of special ops guys are spelunking on their way to destroy the Mother of All Evil about how anyone who truly loves his fellow man and opposes evil is not going to be rejected by the christian God, when all is said and done. The ecumenism is all very kumbaya, but doesn't really accurately reflect theology.

Barb discovers some new gifts in this novel - the ability to see the demons that infest much of the human population on Earth, and the ability to hear their voices, as well. This is balanced by being able to see angels, too. FLUF sends her to Chattanooga to combat an outbreak of madness that appears to be caused by the supernatural, and where her friend Janea, priestess of Freya, encountered something that left her basically in a coma. Barb, and her FBI sidekick must find out who the bad guys are, neutralize them, and figure out how to revive Janea, all without the general public becoming aware of Special Circumstances.

The book has three sections, with the first one being set in Chattanooga, then the middle section appears to take place at DragonCon, but which is actually a supernatural version of the convention, where gods, demigods, and random souls attend. Janea's spirit is sent there to work her way back to consciousness, through truly "finding herself".  The third section deals with a massive threat to the entire country by the Mother of All Evil, who is rapidly producing monster hordes to take over America and eventually overrun the world. The ending is a huge deus ex machina, which was sort of annoying.

I think that Ringo is tired of writing a heroine who doesn't have any sex scenes, as at the very end, Barbara catches her husband in bed with someone when she returns home. I guess this is going to make it all right for her to fool around? Maybe in Ringo's christianity.

Ringo tosses out a little in-joke about his Paladin of Shadows series at one point.

"Fortunately, theres a group of Asatru covering the Caucasus. Led by a demon-possessed former SEAL. Good story...I could write a book. Too tired."

This is a fun book, if you don't think about it too much.

The Hot Gate by John Ringo

The Hot Gate is the third in the Troy Rising series by John Ringo. The story principally follows the life of one of his previous characters, Dana Parker, through the next set of challenges facing the people of Earth in their war with the Rangora and their allies. Dana starts out with a milk run, shuttling a group of precocious youngsters to the battlestation/asteroid, Troy, a publicity stunt to name the fourth station soon coming online and encouraging Earth's best and brightest to consider careers in space. She crosses paths once more with Tyler Vernon, the most powerful man in the Solar System, and their relationship grows just slightly.

Dana's next assignment is to a portion of the fleet where the South American nations have done most of the staffing, whose state of readiness is far short of ideal. Her assignment is to straighten out some maintenance and morale issues. Typically for her, she bulls ahead where angels (or Anglos) fear to tread, and she makes some powerful enemies on the political side while doing so. The Suds, as they are called, have major cultural issues at the root of the problems, and being told by a woman how to do their jobs doesn't go over very well.

When a problem crops up with one of the AIs, Granadica, that is responsible for "fabbing" many of the parts that go into the Fleet, Vernon gets a brainstorm and attacks the problem himself. He drags Dana into the middle of things, as she has a habit of treating all of the AIs in the Solar System as "just folks" and he has a hunch that she can help him get to the bottom of things. In the midst of resolving that problem, some of Dana's political problems also get resolved, and she and Tyler grow, again, a bit closer. Tyler doesn't have many friends, mostly just sycophants and users, and Dana's natural instinct to treat everyone as "just folks" draws him to her in a special way. Nothing romantic, really...yet.

When the Rangora violate ongoing peace talks with an attack, it will take everything Tyler and Dana, and the rest of Earth's forces can muster to defeat them once more. This novel delivers quite well on the promise of the first two.

One good quote, where I think Ringo and I see eye-to-eye:

Vernon said, "I tried never to talk down to my kids when they were growing up. Treat them as adult as you can and they learn to be treated like adults. It kind of pisses them off when teachers and such don't, but kids adjust remarkably well."

I tried to take that approach rasing my kids. Seems to have worked, they're both fully functional, competent adults.

Citadel by John Ringo

Citadel is the second book in Ringo's Troy Rising series, and in a way it breaks the mold set in the first. Most of Live Free or Die takes place from the point of view of Tyler Vernon, the man who successfully opens up trade with the Glatun and organizes the Earth resistance to the Horvath. Now, Ringo introduces a couple of new characters so that we can get a better perspective of what's going on with the man-made planetoid, Troy, as construction on a war time footing predominates this book.

The Horvath were smacked around pretty hard at the end of LFoD, and are most likely off licking their wounds somewhere, but the Rangora empire which gave the Horvath most of the fleet that Troy wiped out have decided that the Terrans must be dealt with sooner than later, so their punitive fleet, more modern and powerful than the Horvath's, is on the way. Ringo also introduces a couple of characters on the Rangora side of things, so that we can see what their high command is thinking, as each of a series of space battles falls into place.

On the military side of things, we get Engineering Apprentice Dana Parker, a bright young woman who is part of the space navy. Fresh out of the academy, she experiences a crash course (sometimes literally) in maintaining and repairing the space vehicles used by the fleet, and as a coxswain, or pilot. On the civilian side, there's Butch Allen, a member of a poor family with fourteen children, who takes the opportunity to go to Troy as an apprentice welder. He survives the hazing rituals of the existing crew and the rigors of training and working in microgravity and hard vacuum, to become an integral part of the construction and later salvage operations as succeeding fleets sent by the Rangora are reduced to their component pieces and used by the Earth fleet for their needs.

The Rangoran characters are possibly the best of a bad lot. Most of the high command consistently underestimate the fighting ability and technological level of Earth, but Major To'Jopeviq and his political officer, Lieutenant Jith Beor, are prone to a more realistic assessment of the odds. This puts them at odds with most of their colleagues and superiors, but in the end they are justified in a Pyrrhic fashion.

Most hard science fiction and military buffs will probably really enjoy this novel, as it explores the possibilities of applying new technology to an old endeavor. I know I did. Waiting eagerly for Troy Rising III.

A Deeper Blue by John Ringo

A Deeper Blue is the fifth and possibly final novel in this series. Mike, Kildar, Jenkins is in a self-induced drunken stupor at the start of this novel, emotionally incapacitated by the loss of a loved one in the previous book (spoiler?). Unfortunately, islamic terrorists have teamed up with drug runners in the Caribbean to attempt to import VX nerve gas to the continental US, and perpetrate a WMD attack. When the President calls, Mike won't answer, so his second in command, Adams, and some of the intel and combat teams head to Florida to work with the CIA, FBI, ATF, and all the alphabet soup you can eat to try to stop the terrorists.

When Adams and Vanner, the Kildar's intel chief, are shot in a raid that turns into a trap, Mike must rouse himself from his caravanserai and head for the States to avenge them and continue the operation. There's lots of great action on the high seas, as the Mountain Tigers take to cigarette boats to pursue the smugglers, others fast-rope onto a freighter to interrogate the crew, and Katya "Cottontail" impersonates a Girls Gone Wild coed to infiltrate the drug lord's yacht.

True to form, no surprises here. Action-packed fun for mature audiences only.

Choosers of the Slain by John Ringo

Possibly the best part of this book comes from the forward, "Any attempt to learn anything from these books is disrecommended by the author, the publisher and the author's mother who wishes to state that he was a very nice boy and she doesn't know what went wrong." Ringo cracks me up sometimes.

In the third book in the Paladin of Shadows series, Mike is pretty well settled in as the ruler, or Kildar, of his own private Idaho in Georgia (the country not the state). The training of his mountain militia is going well, and the training of his harem even better. The crops are coming in and the new brewery is almost built. What more can a man ask for?

Well, a normal man might not ask for anything much, but a senator sure will, and when Mike is called to Washington to meet with a powerful member of the President's opposition, he's not especially happy about it. It seems that one of the congressman's friends has lost his daughter in Eastern Europe somewhere, presumably kidnapped and sold into white slavery. Senator Traskel makes an offer the Kildar can't quite refuse, both because of the five million dollar reward and his nagging sense that something just doesn't smell quite right here.

So Mike takes some of his fighters and intel folks off into the hinterlands - actually, they start in the hinterlands and head to the big cities - to see what they can dig up. The problem of sexual slavery is huge in the ruins of ancient Samarkand, and Mike smells a great big rat living in the moral sewers.

Just another rapid-fire adventure, complete with the usual sex and blood and rock and roll. There is one amusing side plot going on, with the Keldaran lad Mike has designated to get the marketing started for Mountain Tiger beer booking a convention booth in Sin City. Mike and his troupe of lovelies and heavies take a break from the combat action to fly into town, wow the sales reps, and disrupt the smooth operations of a couple of governments, while they're at it.

Kildar by John Ringo

Kildar is the second book in the Paladin of Shadows series, which starts with Ghost. In this book, Mike wandering through Eastern Europe, looking for a place to lie low after foiling several terrorist plots in the last book. He's driving through a snowstorm in Georgia (the country, not the state) and gets stranded in a small town in the mountains. While getting to know the local constabulary a bit, he discovers an old caravanserai for sale for a cool million Euros, with ownership rights to a small valley with tenant farmers also thrown in, which turns out to be just what he needs.

The tenant farmers are called the Keldara, and in an amazingly convenient coincidence, all of the women turn out to be supermodel gorgeous and the men to be the descendents of ancient warriors. Mike sets out to modernize the valley and its subistence farming techniques to improve the lives of the Keldara, and hires a cadre of his old special forces pals to train up a mountain militia to defend his new digs, and incidentally to interdict Chechen terrorist movements through the area.

As one might expect from experience with Ghost, the story is filled with lots of military trivia, graphic battles, and gratuitous sex. The climax (if you'll forgive the expression) is reached when Mike's Keldaran forces defeat a light batallion of Chechen bad guys with five squads of half-trained farm boys, who catch on to soldiering like tigers in a sheep cot, and when they rescue a group of girls who were sold to the Chechens to be sex slaves and Mike diverts them to his own harem, for lack of any better ideas.

Oh, and most importantly, the women of the valley brew the best beer in the known universe.

Just a fun romp to while away the hours.

Ghost by John Ringo

Ghost is the first book in Ringo's Paladin of Shadows series. I had a review of the fourth book, Unto the Breach, already written and posted it here in June, so since I've got them handy both in paperback and Nook form, I'll probably do some catchup and give you some info on the earlier books, too.
Ghost is written as a series of three interlinked stories, which would work as novellas, or which might have been serialized in the SF mags at first. In the first little vignette, Mike Harmon, a retired Navy Seal who is trying to settle in to life as a college student after leaving the teams, witnesses a co-ed getting snatched by what are obviously professionals, and decides quickly to do something about it.

He follows the kidnappers, and discovers that they are terrorists who intend to ship the girls they've captured -50 in all - to an undisclosed location in the Middle East, and broadcast their torture and murder on worldwide TV to force the U.S. to remove its forces from the area. Mike, whose nickname in the teams was "Ghost" for his ability to move and kill silently, stows away on the plane the terrorists are using and hitchhikes all the way to Syria to their hidden base. There, he foils the plot and rescues the girls, of course. The U.S. government at its highest levels is grateful for his exploits and rewards him with lots of cash and sort of puts him on retainer to help them deal with other issues that may come up.

The second story takes place in the Caribbean, where Mike is enjoying some R&R on the fishing boat he bought with some of the loot from the first story. He's partying with some beach bunnies when the call comes in that terrorists have a nuclear weapon that they're smuggling through the area to plant somewhere in Florida and detonate. Mike drops his fun and games and picks up his weapons and heads out to foil the plot.

The third story shifts to Eastern Europe, where Mike is hanging out, now that things have gotten a little hot for him in the Caribbean. He's actually on the prowl in the brothels there when he runs across a hooker with a heart of plutonium...well, actually she just tries to sell him a nuke. Intrigued, he has her lead him to the sellers, but it's too late; the bomb has already been sold to some Chechens. He lets his friends in Washington know what's going on, then follows his nose as the trail leads all over Europe to find out who has the bomb now and what their target is. As you might imagine, it all ends mostly well for Mike, not so well for the terrorists.

Graphic violence, graphic sex, and a smart-ass hero. What's not to love?

Princess of Wands by John Ringo

(review written 10/17/07)

Soccer Mom goes Rambo? This seems to be the underlying theme of Princess of Wands, by John Ringo. As always, Ringo writes fast-paced action that entertains, but there's just a few flaws in the book that niggle at my mind.

We have Barbara Everette, a "good Christian" woman, who was raised as a military brat, and whose father instilled in her a penchant for martial arts mastery and firearms proficiency. One weekend, while on a solo "vacation" from her husband and three kids, she gets forced into a conflict with a minor demigod who has begun gathering worshipers down in the Louisiana bayou. Her strong faith in God and Christ protects her from his evil influence, and allows her to manifest some pretty strong offensive "magic" skills and take him down. She's then recruited by a secret organization that battles supernatural evil creatures.

The first thing that sorta bugs me in this story is the cardboard cutout nature of some of the supporting characters, especially her husband. He's briefly summarized as a typical sports obsessed, helpless in the kitchen (and probably in the bedroom), self-absorbed twit. When his wife tells him she's taking off for the weekend by herself, he can't even rouse himself from the playoff game he's watching on tv to ask her any questions except, "Who's going to cook for us?" Same scene replayed later when she's leaving for a week to go to a training camp for paladins.

I have a tough time believing that a heroine as strong, intelligent and capable as Barbara is ever going to settle for someone this dopey. I also have a tough time believing that husbands that shallow actually exist, except in sitcoms. Their three kids in the story are pretty much just scenery, as well.

There's a conversation about going armed whenever leaving the house where Barbara says something like, "I'm pretty sure I would have been date-raped a couple of times, if the guys I was with hadn't known I was packing (a pistol) and wasn't afraid to use it" GMAFB! Not only would she not get date-raped, she wouldn't ever get asked out a 2nd time. How in the world did she snag a husband, with that attitude?

Barbara remembers being attacked by a knife-wielding rapist when she was in college, and disabling him quickly with her martial arts skills. She's also spent a lot of time at the gun range over the years, perfecting her target shooting. Ok, both plausible, I suppose. I'm not sure how well this translates into true combat skills when she finally faces a half-dozen armed thugs attacking her through the window of her hotel room, but she's able to take them all out without taking any damage, herself. Supernatural aid?

I was sorta irritated that Ringo introduces a cop character named Kelly, gives him way more fleshing out than any other character in the book, then kills him off halfway through. Wouldn't it be nice for a supernatural crime fighter to have a friend on the police force in later installments?

I'm not sure if Ringo's playing it straight or not in this book, but one of the themes that emerge is that not all Christians are the judgemental, holier-than-thou sorts that get skewered in the media. Or, at least, Barbara is not, and she claims there are others who aren't, either. We don't meet any of them in this book, though. Makes me wonder...again, a cardboard cutout view of the Christian and soccer mom life. We don't hear about any of Barbara's friends, who presumably would be that sort of Christian, and that she'd be close to. We are briefly informed that she was PTA president, and a couple other things, but still she has no close friends that appear in the story. Doesn't seem to have any commitments to worry about when she goes jaunting off on the weekend or for the whole week, like attending a bible study, teaching a sunday school class, or anything community oriented. Doesn't sound like a "good Christian woman" to me, but hey, I'm funny that way.

Ringo's got this ecumenical thing going on with the secret organization. Most of its members are not Christians, but mostly Wiccans, worshipers of Norse Gods, oriental gods, etc. There's an ongoing dialog about how all of the "good" gods are perhaps just facets of "The Light" and the christian or "White God" is another, albeit extremely powerful one. This is so totally in conflict with Christian doctrine, i.e., "I am the Way...no man comes to the Father but through Me.", that I begin to think the point of this book is more an anti-apologetic than not. He seems to be attempting to reconcile christianity with all those other "equally valid" religions out there. Very New Age.

Anyway, the story is pretty good, the concept interesting, but I know that Mr. Ringo can do a much better job of plotting, characterization, and making the details of the story consistent. If he's going to engage our brains by introducing philosophical discussions, he needs to keep the rest of the story more believable, so we're not distracted.

The Hero by John Ringo and Michael Z. Williamson

I liked Michael Z. Williamson's first novel so well that I thought I'd check out something else by him. The only thing I had handy was this collaboration by Ringo and Williamson, so...

I was a bit disappointed. It's possibly my own fault. I stopped reading Ringo's Posleen war series after about the fourth book, and that was quite some time ago, so there was probably a lot of background information that would have made this book make far more sense to me.

There were probably many interesting things in this book about the nature of the Posleen, Aldenata, and Darhel races that avid readers of the series have been puzzling over for years, but they were pretty much lost on me.

Ringo and Williamson spend quite a bit of time building the characters on a special forces team, letting us get to know them, perhaps to empathize with them. The team is sent to a world where the Blobs (a new enemy, as far as I can tell) have an outpost. Previous teams have failed to come back with any information.

The team discovers an ancient ruin of the Aldenata civilization, with some sort of mysterious artifact, which they remove and take with them. They also find the Blob outpost, and it turns out to be a decoy. They begin to head back to their waiting ship to return to the home worlds, when one of their number, Dagger, betrays and kills most of them with a neural grenade, intending to steal the artifact for himself, as it's potentially worth a billion credits.

What the heck? Why did they give us all this information about characters who were merely going to be cannon fodder after a short portion of the book?

The one alien member of the team, who can sense emotions and sometimes thoughts, if they are intense enough, a Darhel named Tindal, realizes the attack is coming just in time to grab the artifact and run. Another member of the team, Ferret, reacts just enough to avoid being killed, though he is somewhat crippled by the neural damage to his legs. From that point forward, the three of them play a cat-and-mouse game on the route back to the rendezvous point.

Dagger wants the artifact for himself, Tindal wants to take it to his home planet, where it can be studied by his people, and Ferret just wants revenge for his fallen comrades. Aside from the tension of them stalking each other for the next 150 pages or so, there's not a lot of meat to this novel. There were some interesting "reveals", perhaps, about the Darhel race, for those who have been following the series more closely.

I don't think this was either author's best work.

Short Takes

9/21/07 Finished reading Through the Looking Glass, by Ringo, the other night. It was ok, but not spectacular. Started reading Medalon by Jennifer Fallon. It's the first in a trilogy, I think loosely tied in to other stuff she's written, so I may end up picking up some more stuff by her. Enjoyable, though derivative. I recognize some thefts from Eddings, in particular.

10/2/07 I'm re-reading, twenty years later, the Paksennarion stuff by Elizabeth Moon. I'd forgotten how good it was.

10/22/07 Re-reading the Vatta's War stuff by Moon. She's so good.

Short Takes

1/21/06 Book-wise, I finished Black, by Dekker (a bit inane), and am currently reading Runner, by Dietz and My FBI by Freeh.

1/24/06 Began reading Ghost, by John Ringo, and couldn't put it down...so I didn't...till it was finished. Pretty good anti-terrorist rant, a la Tom Clancy. Brutal violence, brutal sex, not for the faint of heart.

March to the Stars, by John Ringo and David Weber

March to the Stars is the third in a series, beginning with March Upcountry and Marching to the Sea. The situation set up at the beginning of the series is that a spoiled young prince, heir tertiary to the throne of the Empire of Man (read galactic empire here), is marooned by sabotage on a primitive planet, and must fight his way across first a continent, then an ocean, to reach the spaceport, where he can presumably hijack a ship and return to the Empire.


Between Weber and Ringo, you have two of the most accomplished masters of combat SF alive today, and it shows in the military aspects of the story (as far as I can tell from my non-military background). The human aspects of the story are not as fully fleshed out. Prince Roger eventually makes the transition from spoiled rich kid to effective and respected field commander of the Imperial Marines stranded with him, and the dialog is pretty snappy, but there's not a lot of time spent by the characters in any meaningful thought or deeply conflicted reflection. It's pretty much guts, guns and glory all the way.

By the time March to the Stars begins, Roger's group of Imperial Marines has acquired a following of the native Mardukians, (four-armed slimy lizards), who may very well be the finest fighting force on the planet. They've made across the continent, and now are sailing in wind-powered ships across the ocean, to the continent where the spaceport is located. They get to fight sea monsters, pirates, and evil priests along the way.

It won't go down in the annals of classic literature, but it's a fast paced fun romp, if you like the militant brand of SF.