Where Humanity Faces Extinction

Star Strike by Ian Douglas
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Parts of this novel were awesome. Super fun. It's got a great premise, with humans trying to survive in a universe where the Xul, a very advanced, ancient alien race, wipes out intelligent, technologically advanced species whenever they find them. Humans barely survived coming into contact with them centuries before, and it seems that the Xul have luckily lost track of them. However, they're about to come back into contact.

Great stuff. There's lots of cool technology, much of it based on good hard science, and the rest based on fun impossibilities (like faster than light travel) that make this type of novel work. If it had been all about that, I think this would be a 5 for me. But huge chunks of the novel are given up to a pointlessly drawn-out marine boot camp and a bunch of other military life throat-clearing passages that get super dull. We would go from edge of your seat action to a complete stop, with a couple of people chatting about stuff the author seems to care about. There are long conversations about politics, usually lamenting the way regular people don't understand what it is the marines are doing for them and how ridiculous the public is. You could have pictured Col. Jessup delivering a lot of these lectures.

Then we'd get a little action again. Then stop to have a long chat. I can put up with long technobabble passages in a novel like this, with all the weapons being described and given goofy alphanumeric names, and the origin of the FTL drives explained, and the like. I wish it was only that.

I almost never do this, but I skipped a bunch of it. Skimmed many pages. It didn't matter a bit to the story. And that, of course, was my problem with it. The readers digest version of this story would be great. All the action and none of the dreary, pointless, editorializing conversations.

I wonder if I'm being too hard on this, giving only a 3 and some harsh criticism. Then I ask myself, do I want to read the sequels? Or related series? I don't. And there's a bunch of them, so that's a bummer.

View all my reviews