 |
| Click image to purchase from Amazon |
This review contains spoilers
Before I picked up this book, I’d only read one other novel by David Weber. I know a few people who absolutely love his Honor Harrington series, and because of them, I plan to read them someday. When I saw what appeared to be a stand-alone novel by Weber, I picked it up in the hopes of getting more of a feel for Weber and his writing. I must say, I wish that I hadn’t.
Unbeknownst to humanity, a great and sprawling galactic empire exists, made up of dozens of different races. Most of them are peaceable and non-confrontational; however, there are a few that have expansionist leanings. To try to direct those who want to move out into the stars, prospective planets are scouted in advance to determine their suitability for colonization.One such survey observes Earth during the 1400s and concludes that we’re too bloodthirsty to be allowed into the empire, but we’re not technologically advanced enough to protect.
Hundreds of years later, in modern times, humanity is stunned when an alien fleet appears and uses kinetic weapons to systematically destroy all military power on Earth. Even though we’ve advanced in leaps and bounds, the warlike Shongairi are determined to either subvert humanity as a slave species or destroy us entirely. But the survivors aren’t prepared to go down without one heck of a fight…
I’ll freely admit that I only made it halfway through this book before I started skimming. Weber is well known for his military science fiction, and just as well known for his focus on technology. Such focus in and of itself isn’t bad—it can lend verisimilitude to what might otherwise be a lot of technobabble. But Weber takes it to extremes in this novel. Every time a weapon is used, or even mentioned, there are paragraphs that detail its range, its power, its calibration, and how much damage it can do. This often occurs in the middle of battles, disrupting the action. Most casual readers will not be weapons geeks (as Weber seems to be) and won’t care about the precise specs of a particular kind of rocket launcher.
Unfortunately, this overabundance of detail isn’t confined to weapons; it’s used for everything. In one instance, he interrupts the action to devote several pages of text to describing the upgrading of a cabin that some characters use as a bolthole after the invasion. No detail is spared, and readers will learn how many feet of cable they used, how many miles of road lead to the cabin, and exactly what supplies are stored there.
This tendency even extends to characters—names and histories are given for just about everybody that Weber introduces, and oftentimes, all that info is laid out mere minutes before the character dies messily. Weber’s technique for conveying this information is often to let the character monologue to him- or herself, and such instances come across as a weird form of useless infodump. In an interview on Amazon.com, Weber talks about wanting to put readers into the minds of the characters, alien or human, in order to “play fair” with his portrayals and to keep either side from becoming, as he puts it, “cardboard cutouts”. I think that Weber has missed a point here, in that wars often have many faceless casualties, and that readers aren’t going to care about the musings of someone who won’t be important to the story anyway.
And oddly enough, Weber gets the completely opposite effect to what he wanted: by introducing so many characters (details or no), they blend together and very few of them really stand out as individuals.
But Weber’s biggest blunder in Out of the Dark isn’t his loving descriptions of weaponry, and it isn’t characters who endlessly natter to themselves. It’s the fact that he took what could have been a fairly serviceable Independence Day type story and turned it into a hard sci-fi version of werewolves versus vampires.
Yes, you heard correctly. The Shongairi, although never directly described (one of the few things in this novel that isn't), have characteristics of canines—tails, fur, pricked ears, pointed teeth, carnivorous appetites. And humanity is saved from the brink of destruction in the last 30 pages of the book by the appearance of Vlad Drakulya and his minions. I would be amused if it wasn’t so ludicrous. Even funnier, the vampires destroy the alien fleet by latching onto the outsides of their shuttlecraft and riding them back to the main ships in order to kill everyone on board.
There are two huge problems with this scenario. The first is the fact that this is nothing more than a whopping deus ex machina. There are no mentions of vampires until, quite literally, the last several pages of the book. And then, suddenly, Drakulya! In the back of my head, Robin Williams began his routine about God getting stoned and creating a platypus just to screw with Darwin, because the inclusion of vampires was equally ludicrous and inexplicable. All the fighting and struggling that humanity did meant nothing, because the vampires saved the day.
The other problem is that, concerning the vampires’ method of infiltrating the ships, rationality dies screaming in a blaze of contradiction, much like a vampire in the sun.Which, by the way, these vampires do not do when they should have. It is specifically noted that the vampires cannot bear the light of the sun; and yet, they can ride shuttles past the atmosphere and beyond the earth’s curvature, where they would most definitely be exposed to sunlight. This doesn’t even take into account the questions of the intense heat and air friction present on the exterior of a shuttle during ascent—given that wind speeds in violent storms have been known to rip people’s clothing and shoes off, it’s a wonder the vampires didn’t arrive at the fleet naked. Vampires do have certain restrictions in accordance with folklore, and not adhering to them defies logic. I can suspend my disbelief quite a bit, but even I have my limits.
I’m sorry to say that this is rumored to be the first book in a series. And Weber’s name probably carries enough clout that further books will see print. Out of the Dark began its life as a novella in the Warriors anthology, and someone should have seen to it that it never got farther than that.
Also by this author: Off Armageddon Reef
Comments
Post a Comment