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Birds of Prey | Rating | |
| D | |||
| David Drake | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| N/A | N/A | ||
It is 242 AD, and the Roman Empire is falling apart. Corruption and graft sap any efforts to do anything useful, including preserve civilization. And into this setting Aulus Perennius, imperial agent, learns of a new threat to the empire, and to humanity. Aliens are in Cilicia, a nest of billions of eggs guarded by six adults. If they hatch, it'll go badly for humanity. And the source of this information is Lucius Calvus, a man with unusual abilities from the far future.
It's a very interesting idea. It mixes time travel, alien invasion, first contact stories, and historical fiction in a unique manner. It starts out well, with a view of an angry mob and then showing just how bad the officials are. It sets the place very well, and readers learn very quickly just how bad off the empire is. But then it continues to harp on this fact. It takes much longer than it should for the expedition to Cilicia (wherever that is - we are never given a map or a reference in text) to get launched thanks to the state of the navy and the army and the petty beureucratic infighting that goes on. This is kind of the point, I admit. But it's a point we already have learned in previous scenes, and it just becomes boring.
It is, essentially, a surpluss of detail. We are not told but shown over and over how the empire is self-destructing. When pirates attack the ship, we undergo dozens of pages not of fighting but preparing to fight - assembling the ballista, strapping on armor, planning the approach of the decrepit ship, etc. Dozens of pages. Another fifty are devoted to the fight. Sometimes such detail is good, giving the reader a sense of being there, making the world real. But here it just slowed everything down for me. And this happened over and over throughout the story.
And yet, in some aspects, there is actually not enough detail. What is Lucius' race's relation to these aliens? We learn they fought them in the future, but who was the agressor? Did the aliens throw this nest back in time to take care of Earth before we can be a threat, or was this an invasion by the aliens of 242 AD, and humans are sent back in time to prevent it from succeeding? How did the humans of the future know of this nest, anyway? And lastly, in the end, when Lucius takes some actions to put a new, strong emperor on the throne, one that may restore the empire, is this a variation from our real history, or one that leads to it? I am not a historian, and neither will most readers know such a detail; yet the simple line that would tell the reader is absent.
In some ways, the episodic feel of the story is just as bad. We are told the main goal fairly early, that of destroying this nest. But all the trials and tribulations they must overcome, all of them save one at the very beginning, have nothing to do with this goal. These aliens are not dogging their steps. They're waiting for them at the nest. The pirates and homicidal christians and other problems could as easily happened in another book, entirely unrelated. And they never tie into each other. I dislike episodic stories, and this book is exactly that. The fact that there are only a few episodes is mitigated by their extreme length, thanks to all the detail.
There is an old saying: "The devil is in the details." How very true. This book absolutely dies because of an oversupply of them.
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