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Pandora's Legions | Rating | |
| D | |||
| Christopher Anvil | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| N/A | N/A | ||
To say this book was a disappointment would be an understatment.
The basic premise is one I personally find particularly enjoyable. Aliens come to Earth on a mission of conquest, and find themselves so befuddled by those wacky humans they lose. Except in this case, they win at first. They lose by letting the conquered humans actually start to proliferate throught their empire. It's not long before they lose control.
The problems, though, are multiple. The aliens look almost exactly like humans, for instance, except for being hairier and having a short tail that never really comes into play anywhere. This is an artifact of the stories' making; they were written in the 60's and 70's (I have got to remember to look at the publication dates in anthologies!) and now accumulated into this book. Another problem is the various ways humans make a mess of their empire. I mean, humans are a bit odd, perhaps, but what he made happen is ludicrous. And no, I'm not going to cite specific examples; I've blocked them from my memory by now, and I don't intend to go find them again. A third major problem is that there is a second storyline involving the human that the aliens hired as a troubleshooter. The problems he encounters that the aliens can't seem to deal with are rather paltry, really, and he solves them in ways that vary between vague, unlikely (depending on too many variables of behavior that could not be predicted but somehow worked out perfectly), or strike me as simply wrong in that they wouldn't work.
The last problem is the vagueness. After reading stories by Weber and Ringo, you won't be satisfied with a story that has a paragraph describing these three fleets flying towards each other, the two larger ganging up and the smallest one, which happens to be the most sane bunch in the book - and then the next paragraph saying the battle was over, the good-guy admiral having brilliantly out-manuevered the other two and decimated them both. I mean, come on!
Supposedly, according to Eric Flint, an otherwise good (or at least decent) author who did the gathering and editing, Anvil is a classic SF author of the 60's. Maybe. But to me, this book just sucks.
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