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Gust Front | 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 | ||
I liked this much, much more than the first book. Though they get the same rating, this one is better. Why? More action.
In the first book, something like a third, maybe half, of the book goes by before battle is joined. In this one... hmm... actually, I just checked, and pagewise it's just about as long. But it goes by a lot faster - battle isn't the only sort of action available in a military novel, after all - and the book is something like 250 pages longer than the first. This is a long, long book, at 700+ pages, and I loved most of it.
This is the biggie. Or at least the start of the biggie. The Posleen are heading for Earth. The humans have to prepare, plan, and defend. This isn't easy. Where will the Posleen land? When? How do you defend cities of millions of people that weren't built for defense? Is that even possible? Who is incompetent and who are the heroes? It's not an idle question, as Ringo, holding true to his first book, doesn't make the human militaries invincible warriors who know all there is to know about killing.
This book is also good because Ringo starts telling teh reader a little about the enemy. In the first, there were almost no areas from the Posleen point of view. I rather like it when authors add that, showing their dismay at humanity's knack ot war, or their plans for how to take this hill or that. But that is certainly present here. Not in abundance, but enough. And in those sections he manages to drop hints of how the Posleen got to be the way they are now. He never says outright, though, so you have to pay attention.
My one irk with this story is that the Posleen seem to have figured out human language, or at least our writing, remarkably quickly. Ringo never explains how. Worse, at one point near the end a soldier taunts the enemy - in their own language. How does anybody know their language? Why don't we do something with it? That really needs to be explained, but it is not.
This irk, though, is rather offset by how Ringo mentions, on page 611, that a small enemy lander touched down "outside Redmond, Washington." Since I live in Redmond, I was mighty pleased. I know exactly where it probably went, too. Would have been tricky for the military to contain them there, let me say. Fun to think about.
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