 |
A Hymn Before Battle | Rating | |
| A | |||
| John Ringo | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| The Legacy of the Aldenata | A Hymn Before Battle, Gust Front, When the Devil Dances, Hell's Faire, The Hero, Cally's War, Watch on the Rhine | ||
This is good, hard, military fiction. Not hard science, mind you, but hard military. This guy knows his stuff.
The basic scenario is something of a cross between Foster's The Damned series, in which aliens enlist humanity as warriors in an old war, and Weber's series that started with Mutineer's Moon, in which humanity finds itself facing a horde of millions of enemy and defeat means extinction. There's a few twists, though. First, this is a lot more competently told, from a military standpoint, than Foster's books, probably because Ringo served and Foster didn't. Second, whereas Mutineer's Moon and the first sequel, The Armageddon Inheritance, were primarily space-navy battles, this is focused on ground-pounders. And last, the good guys are sneaky bastards, and the reader isn't sure they actually want humans to win - even though their own worlds and lives rely on exactly that!
The first book, this book, is roughly half preparation for the war - hence the title, I think - and half battle. The preparations are good, and make sense, but take up over two hundred pages. It is in those pages that the US President announces the first contact, and why it was made. It is here that we learn of some of the Galactic technology that they are handing over to us to let us have a moderate chance against the Posleen. And here that we meet the main character, as well as some of the "good" guys.
The rest of the book is a battle on a distant planet (is that redundant?). One thing I liked about this book is that the military were not portrayed as Gods, unable to make mistakes even if they tried. Indeed, the military Ringo writes and probably worked in is very fallable, with idiots commanding battalions and generals who can't let their politics go long enough to listen to the obvious. On the other hand, Ringo doesn't fall into the trap of the main character being the only person who does see the obvious. He is clearly a genius tactician, but he's not the only one in the book. A nice change to be sure.
I definitely liked this book. Read it if you like military sci-fi. This one is heavily infantry-oriented. Indeed, it's pretty much entirely focused on infantry, so those of you who want space operas may be disappointed. Or you might not. Check it out.
| By Title | By Author | By Rank |