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The Apocalypse Troll | Rating | |
| C | |||
| David Weber | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| N/A | N/A | ||
Weber is generally a very good author. His titles are wonderful space opera with nice, consistent physics that he utilizes to their utmost in his fleet actions.
Generally.
The book starts off pretty well, with more space-navy stuff. Evil aliens are at war with humans, and the aliens are losing. In a desperate bid they attempt to go back in time and destroy humanity in the neolithic or other prehistoric era. But their fleet is detected by a human fleet on their way back to port for overhaul, and has to be stopped. They manage to do enough damage that, eventually, it all ends up with a single human superpilot versus a single alien cyborg pilot in the 21st century, instead of the stone age.
Up til then, things are reading well. Weber does navy stuff very nicely. But once it's one on one, the book falls apart. The good guy - girl, actually - contacts the US Navy, and through them most of the governments of the world. Smart girl, she knows she can't possibly do this alone. But every single important person is immune to the telepathic Troll (the cyborg). Yes, the Troll is telepathic. But, lucky day, nearly everyone on the good guy side is immune! More than that, they have plans to work around the important people who are not immune. Every good guy is earnest and competent. The bad guys are racists and bloodthirsty. Things just don't get any more black and white, and it's damned unrealistic.
The real killer of the book, though, is the exposition. There's a lot of infodumping going on, here. Starting on about page 100, there's one that lasts for fifty pages as the superwoman from the future tells the history of the war and contact with the enemy to her main present-time contact. In a 400-page book, fifty pages is a lot. And there are other expositions sprinked throughout that last from a page or so to five or ten, including at least one two-page dump about a war coming in the next few years that, ultimately, has nothing to do with the plot whatsoever.
It really hurts to know that one of my favorite authors wrote this. I suppose they can't all be gems, but still... ouch.
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