RogerBW's Blog

Antares Victory, Michael McCollum 12 April 2016

2002 military SF, long-delayed final volume in the Antares trilogy. The combined human fleets are taking on the Ryall menace, to remove it once and for all. But is there any option short of extermination?

I don't know why the book was separated by more than a decade from the first two, but it certainly has a very different feel from those earlier ones, which were always energetic; this comes perilously close to being tired. There's that warning sign of a long authorial delay: things that were given as statements of fact in earlier books are dismissed as obvious nonsense but it was an understandable mistake because of this; in other words either the author or a reader has noticed a problem and the author, trying to shore up his hard-SF credentials, has felt a need to fix it. (The extreme version of this is Larry Niven's Down in Flames.)

And indeed, after a series of space battles in the first half during which the human leaders worry that things seem to be going too well, the principal hazard that the humans face is not a military breakout by the alien enemy but their own, and their politicians', boredom. Who wants to keep up a blockade fleet for years whlie the alien economy collapses? They're genetically locked into regarding other species as deadly enemies anyway; why not kill them all now?

The best bit here, in among those space battles, is the class of new high-acceleration ships, specially designed to cross a system at a constant 10-gravity burn so as to stop the enemy from getting word out through the jump points. That's quite nicely described, showing off McCollum's engineering background, but it shows clearly how oddly dispassionate the rest of the battles are. They may be realistic, but they're not much fun to read.

So the second half of the book consists of working out how to negotiate with creatures that see you as an inevitably deadly enemy. There have been hints at this in earlier books, and it's clearly a hard problem, which McCollum puts over with reasonable plausibility. The aliens are decently drawn too: sometimes they seem too human, which is after all one of the reasons the conflict has started, but their physiology and psychology diverge enough to keep things interesting. These would be good aliens in any SF book, and for mil-SF they're remarkably fine.

But that's really all the good stuff. The characters are still purest cardboard, and the course of the plot is predictable at least at the grand scale. It's all right, I suppose, but if I'd been waiting fifteen years for this I wouldn't be impressed. I found the first of the trilogy the best of these books, but I'm glad the story has at least been completed.

[Buy this at Amazon] and help support the blog. ["As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases."]

Previous in series: Antares Passage | Series: Antares

Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.

Search
Archive
Tags 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 3d printing action advent of code aeronautics aikakirja anecdote animation anime army astronomy audio audio tech aviation base commerce battletech beer boardgaming book of the week bookmonth chain of command children chris chronicle church of no redeeming virtues cold war comedy computing contemporary cornish smuggler cosmic encounter coup covid-19 crime cthulhu eternal cycling dead of winter doctor who documentary drama driving drone ecchi economics en garde espionage essen 2015 essen 2016 essen 2017 essen 2018 essen 2019 essen 2022 essen 2023 existential risk falklands war fandom fanfic fantasy feminism film firefly first world war flash point flight simulation food garmin drive gazebo genesys geocaching geodata gin gkp gurps gurps 101 gus harpoon historical history horror hugo 2014 hugo 2015 hugo 2016 hugo 2017 hugo 2018 hugo 2019 hugo 2020 hugo 2022 hugo-nebula reread in brief avoid instrumented life javascript julian simpson julie enfield kickstarter kotlin learn to play leaving earth linux liquor lovecraftiana lua mecha men with beards mpd museum music mystery naval noir non-fiction one for the brow opera parody paul temple perl perl weekly challenge photography podcast politics postscript powers prediction privacy project woolsack pyracantha python quantum rail raku ranting raspberry pi reading reading boardgames social real life restaurant reviews romance rpg a day rpgs ruby rust scala science fiction scythe second world war security shipwreck simutrans smartphone south atlantic war squaddies stationery steampunk stuarts suburbia superheroes suspense television the resistance the weekly challenge thirsty meeples thriller tin soldier torg toys trailers travel type 26 type 31 type 45 vietnam war war wargaming weather wives and sweethearts writing about writing x-wing young adult
Special All book reviews, All film reviews
Produced by aikakirja v0.1