We Few, by David Weber and John Ringo

Today I'm wrapping up the Empire of Man series with the final novel, We Few. The result for this book, and I guess for this series overall, is actually a bit of a disappointment. The biggest thing I'm left feeling is that Ringo and Weber had much bigger plans for this series beyond just the four fairly long books, but for whatever reason they kept the series at just four novels and didn't bother to expand it from there. Maybe they had other projects to work on. Maybe Baen decided it wasn't interested in continuing the series, I don't know. But I'm left feeling like the story Weber and Ringo wanted to tell wasn't completed and we got only a fraction of what we could have.

Warning: Mild Spoilers Ahead

Towards the end of the last book, March to the Stars, we discovered that Prince Roger's mother, Empress Alexandra, had been captured by a coup orchestrated in part by Roger's father, the Earl of New Madrid, and the naval minister Prinz Jackson . Roger and the survivors of Bravo Company, Bronze Battalion, have been declared traitors and are officially wanted people throughout Imperial space. Unofficially rumors of the drugs, torture, and rape that New Madrid and Jackson have been using to control Empress Alexandra has been leaking out of the palace and some people are beginning to think maybe Roger wasn't behind the coup after all. When Roger and the survivors of Bravo Company manage to get back to civilized territory they find plenty of allies ready to help them in a daring plan to rescue the Empress and save the Empire.

Plot-wise I actually liked the idea Weber and Ringo managed to come up with for this book. The best plan Roger's staff is able to come up with is that they start up a Mardukan-themed restaurant in Imperial City as an advanced base of operations and a front for the importation of money and equipment for their raid on the Imperial Palace. Most of the battles the heroes have gone through before have been straight-up fights, massive set piece battles with hundreds or thousands of casualties. Seeing Roger and company work on doing a covert operation with a bunch of green, three-meter tall, four armed aliens is different enough to be really interesting. So for that I give it plenty of credit.

On the down side, there is some stuff that is either terribly dull, or stuff that's left out entirely. Some major space naval battles are part of this book, which I'm all for, but Weber goes into the numbering the missiles the ships launch in a salvo, describing how many get defeated by counter-missiles, how many get stopped by point-defense, and then how many manage to get through and strike hits. This is something I've been noticing a lot recently in the Honor Harrington books and it honestly feels like so much padding. I really didn't want to know the exact number of missiles utilized. You say it's fifty thousand? Great. That sounds like a lot. And then we have descriptions of vectors and time lag from transmissions and so on which is very pretty and I'm sure all manner of accurate, but it really takes away from the story.

Another thing that bugs me is the loose ends left at the end of this book, specifically Prinz Jackson and the Saints. From the first book we've had the Saints described as antagonists, but at a larger scale than what Bravo Company was going through. For the last three books the main enemy Bravo company was fighting was the environment of Marduk itself and the natives. The Saints actually appear in the first and third book to be enemies but aside from some mentions about how they're evil enviro-hippies and enemies of the Empire, that's about it. It's almost outright stated that a conflict between the Saints and the Empire is extremely probable in the near future and presumably some of the events of these books would move the two factions closer to war. But instead, Bravo Company and the Empire are dealing with the issue of a civil war at home. By the end of the book the issues with the Saints still have not been resolved or for that matter even addressed so it almost becomes a question of why were the Saints included at all in the series?

The other thread at the end was the escape of Prinz Jackson, the mastermind of the coup against Empress Alexandra. With Jackson safely out of the Sol system and calling as many admirals loyal to him as he can, the Empire is definitely in a state of civil war. With the Saints eager to snap up territory while the Empire is occupied, it's clear that this civil war needs to be resolved quickly and decisively if the Empire is going to survive at all. And we see the start of it when Roger leads the assault on the Imperial Palace to rescue his mother as well as the division within Home Fleet's forces between those loyal to Alexandra and those loyal to Jackson. But otherwise the war is left incomplete. The start of the book has a brief historical passage on Roger who becomes known as Roger the Terrible so presumably he manages to quash Jackson's rebellion, but we're left with so much to be done and so much unexplored.

There are a few minor things as well, but that's kind of niggling over details compared to the big stuff. These books have left me feeling like Weber and Ringo had plans for a huge, complicated world as deep and interesting as that of the Honor Harrington series. Instead we only catch glimpses of this world in a time period spanning not much more than a year. Maybe this was their intention, but it makes me feel like Roger's story is incomplete more than anything else. And so this series is, ultimately, kind of a disappointment.

- Kalpar

March to the Stars, by David Weber and John Ringo

Today I'm looking at March to the Stars, the third book in the Empire of Man series by David Weber and John Ringo where Prince Roger and the survivors of Bravo Company manage to finally reach the spaceport with their band of Mardukan allies and start working on getting off of Marduk and back to Terra. I had expected this book to be a bit of a finale but it introduces some new plot threads and leaves a lot of things hanging which I presume will be wrapped up in We Few, the final book of the series. My opinion of this book is mixed for a number of reasons which I'll go into more detail.

In the broadest strokes, this book is really more of what we've seen before, just the details have changed. Roger and company arrive at a location on Marduk, there is some sort of obstacle in their way, usually a conflict among groups of Mardukans, and to continue on their way Roger and the marines have to fight their way through, leaving plenty of casualties behind them. Only in this case, they cross an ocean on ships, run into a sentient-sacrificing and cannibalism state religion, ally with some barbarians to fight the crazy religious nuts, opposed to last time when they joined up with the religious nuts to fight the barbarians, and finally, finally get to the space port.

I'll start with what I liked about the book, which is the pulp sci-fi action. As I've openly admitted plenty of times here on the blog, I am perfectly happy with the most ridiculous,  pulpy, sci-fi action you can conjure up for me. Spaceships, robot tanks, plasma weapons, I love the heck out of that stuff. And Weber and Ringo can write pulp sci-fi action. That's something they know how to do. So the result is good. And if you like the pulp stuff like I do, Weber and Ringo are good guys to go get your supply from and I highly recommend it. So that's the good part.

The bad part about the book is not one specific thing, it's a lot of little things that add up to some concerns on my part. The biggest was how everyone apparently couldn't figure out that the fire priests were sacrificing people and then eating them. (Granted, I didn't put together the eating people part, but I got the sacrificing people.) This is something that Weber and Ringo telegraphed pretty heavily with a lot of evidence. For example:

1. The fire priests hold their ceremonies in secret, so the marines aren't told what's going on. Pretty suspicious from the get-go.
2. Everyone in the city refuses to talk about the religion and getting any information beyond there being a fire god is basically impossible.
3. During the religious ceremonies, everyone notices the smell of cooking meat, which means some sort of meat is being put on the fire, however, everyone also notices a lack of any livestock animals in the city at any point. The meat must be coming from somewhere but there are no animals to provide it.
4. One of the only things the marines can learn about the religion is that there are servants of the fire god who are called to the temple for religious ceremonies, but the marines don't see a lot of the servants around the city.
5. Most people emphatically do not want to be servants of the fire god.
6. The city of the fire priests heavily engages in slavery, with a nearly constant demand for slaves despite no apparent labor shortage in the city.

I found myself screaming at the characters, ''THEY'RE SACRIFICING PEOPLE! HOW ARE YOU NOT PUTTING THIS TOGETHER?'' I literally went and asked several other people about this and all of them managed to connect the dots like I did. But for the characters in the book have to reboot their translation software to realize that servants of the fire god are actually sacrifices. Like, did they not think it might have been a euphemism? And the team actually has a historian/anthropologist/sociologist with them so she out of anybody should have been able to figure out what the heck was going on.

But that wasn't the only example. At one point in the book Roger makes a statement along the lines that when they get back home he intends to ask his mother to make him Duke of Marduk so he can rule the planet and help shepherd the Mardukans to civilization. It's a one-off line and Weber and Ringo spend basically no time talking about it after that, but it's very concerning to me personally because it feels incredibly tone deaf. We have Roger, a white man with blond hair and green eyes so he's super Aryan, making plans to bring the benefits of civilization to a backwards planet. The problem I have with this is it basically sounds like an argument for colonialism and imperialism.

Without going into a super lengthy explanation, during the height of colonialism in the nineteenth century European nations said it was their duty to bring the benefits of civilization to the ''backwards'', ''primitive'', and ''savage'' peoples, lifting them up to where they could govern themselves. In actuality, the European nations and states like Japan and the United States were just interested in extracting resources from their colonies and any infrastructure they established in their colonies were for the benefit of white colonials and/or the extraction of resources from the colonies. It is widely argued that colonialism and imperialism were not benevolent attempts to spread civilization but calculated moves to expand markets, resources, and power. So to have a white man in a sci-fi book say he plans to ''civilize'' the ''savages'' of Marduk smacks very heavily of colonialism. I don't think Weber and Ringo meant for this to be as tone deaf as I ended up taking it, but it's rather distressing to say the least.

There are a lot of other little issues like this but I'll end with retaking the spaceport towards the end of the book. It's revealed that the imperial colonial governor is not only corrupt but also incompetent and has left secret passages through the defenses around the spaceport so his messengers and smugglers can get in and out. Furthermore an imperial agent has infiltrated his staff and basically knows everything that's going on in the spaceport and is able to give information to the marines, as well as much-needed supplies. As a result, the spaceport, which has been this final goal the team has been working towards and has promised to be this super hard nut to crack at the end of the journey, ends up being a cakewalk. The marines walk through the holes in the defenses, take out the incredibly incompetent guards, capture the governor, and retake the port. It just feels like a massive anticlimax compared to how much Roger and Bravo Company have had to fight through just to get to this final challenge. I feel like Weber and Ringo built it up to be this huge challenge and it ends up being nothing. Of course, we then get with the whammy of a coup attempt back on Terra and now it becomes critically vital for Roger and company to get back to earth and rescue his mother.

Overall this book is okay. There isn't one major thing that is wrong with the book, but there are a lot of little things that add up and significantly detract from the book. In addition there are the classic Weber exposition dumps which can get a little tedious after a while, but I've grown to be used to those at least. If you like pulp sci-fi action, I'm sure you'll enjoy this, but I don't know if this is really the best pulp sci-fi I've read because of all the little issues.

- Kalpar

March to the Sea, by David Weber & John Ringo

Today I'm looking at the second book in the Empire of Man series, March to the Sea, which follows Prince Roger and the dwindling survivors of his marine bodyguard as they cross a mountain range and make the long trek towards the ocean, where hopefully they can get passage on ships that will take them to the continent with Marduk's only spaceport and get Roger safely back to Terra. However, since nothing else about this trip has gone smoothly it should be no surprise that this portion of their journey is fraught with difficulty as well.

On the other side of the mountains the Bronze Battalion discovers that a collection of nomadic tribes called the Boman have joined together into a mighty warhost and are systematically destroying every city as part of a campaign of revenge against the despot of Sindi. If they're going to get to the ocean, they're going to have to pass right through the ongoing Boman invasion. And if they want help crossing the ocean, they're going to have to save the cities targeted by the Boman as well.

I think my biggest complaint about this book is it really could have been divided into two separate books, and I'm actually a little surprised that it wasn't. There are two distinct halves to the book which are honestly the same storyline repeated, at least in very broad terms. In both books the marines arrive at a city-state which is under imminent attack by the Boman and they are utterly unprepared to defend themselves. The marines agree to help train an army for the city-states in exchange for help in getting to their final objective of the starport. Racing against time, the marines introduce new military technologies to the Mardukans and manage to create semi-professional armies. They then engage the Boman and through a combination of their newly trained and equipped allies, as well as the marines' insanely advanced technology, they manage to win a crushing victory against the Boman. Perhaps at great cost, but the Boman shall bother the people of the city-states no more.

So I honestly feel that this could have been split into two books instead of being crammed into one because it feels like the book repeats itself. Although that might not have been a good thing because then you'd have two books that would be very similar instead of one book with similar halves. I just kind of wish that Weber and Ringo had managed to come up with a slightly, slightly different storyline for one half of their book instead. I did find it really boring when the marines were complaining about supply bottlenecks, again, which were preventing them from getting the troop mix they really wanted.

I'm tempted to go into the politics of this book but I'm hesitant for a few reasons. First, it's not really a major part of the book. Most of the book is spent talking about the problems training and equipping an army in a short amount of time and then fighting the Boman. When the characters comment on the political structures of Mardukan societies it's usually little more beyond, ''Theocracies don't like change.'' or ''Our constitutional monarchy is great.'' So it's not like it's even a full argument for me to analyze, refute, or support. Plus, I'm trying to not complain about books having politics I don't like because while I may not like the politics, the author has every right to put them in there. I may disagree, but the book can still have redeeming qualities.

And it's the same with the pro-imperialism argument made by Roger. He says that some people think humanity shouldn't interfere with alien planets that haven't developed interstellar flight because it could affect their culture and identity. Roger counters by saying that the Empire of Man has lots of benefits to bring alien races like the Mardukans who are at a lower technology level. He specifically mentions ending malnutrition and bringing adequate dental care just as examples, but the benefits could be even greater. The humans of course also introduce pike warfare, breech-loading rifles and artillery, and new tactics which revolutionize warfare on Marduk.

Honestly, this is a really complicated question and if any of the dozens of episodes of Star Trek with the Prime Directive are any indication, it's not an easy one. Everyone seems perfectly fine with not mucking about with pre-warp technology civilizations in the abstract and it certainly seems like a fine idea, but when it comes down to the specific people have a really hard time letting a species die because of a supervolcano eruption which they can easily prevent with some graviton particle beams or what have you. So obviously there is some good to be had by bringing the benefits of advanced technology to less developed areas. Even on our own planet I think it's safe to say people across the globe benefit from modern dentistry regardless of where they are, just to stick with the dental example.

But I think we need to also recognize that there are also disadvantages which we may still not be able to fully understand. And we can look at our own history when Europeans came in contact with native peoples in the Americas and Australia. The Europeans brought steel, firearms, livestock, new methods of agriculture, printing presses, just to name a few of the technologies. However contact with Europeans also introduced disease and alcohol, economic exploitation of native peoples and their land, war, social and economic marginalization, attempts at cultural destruction, and a situation where life is still pretty bad for a lot of native people into the twenty-first century. And considering the marines are mostly introducing military technologies which promise to dramatically shift the balance of power on Marduk, I'm hesitant to say this is entirely a good thing.

Unfortunately Weber and Ringo never really get into a detailed exploration of these issues. It's really mentioned once and dropped once again. But I feel like this is still important enough that once it's been brought up we really can't ignore it. Maybe the other two books will be able to go into more detail about these questions, but that remains to be seen.

As military sci-fi fiction I think this is pretty good, especially if you put aside some of the moral questions for a minute anyway. It does get really repetitive because it's the same plot recycled twice in the same book, more or less, but there are lots of good moments.

- Kalpar

March Upcountry, by David Weber and John Ringo

Today I'm looking at the first book in a series co-written by David Weber and John Ringo. If you've spent any time at all looking at my blog, you're probably aware that I've spent a lot of time reading Weber's books. Specifically anything related to the Bolo franchise he's written, and a significant number of the Honor Harrington books. I have a little bit of experience with John Ringo as well, since he wrote Road to Damascus, one of the Bolo books which I had mixed feelings about. But since I could get this book for free from the library, I figured it was worth at least the time to check it out and see if it was any good.

March Upcountry is the first in the Empire of Man series, which I presume follows the adventures of Prince Roger MacClintock. Roger is third in line to the throne and will eventually be replaced in the line of succession by the children of his older siblings, so he's always been superfluous to requirements for the royal family. As a result, Roger has grown up to be a spoiled dandy, more obsessed with his good looks and clothing than anything particularly useful. Much to Roger's dismay his mother sends him on a diplomatic mission to a backwater planet of the empire, mostly to get him out from underfoot. But an assassination attempt on Roger's ship results in Roger and a company of his bodyguards being stranded on an even more remote planet, Marduk.

Marduk is only barely part of the Empire, most of the planet being covered by dense jungles filled with populations of hostile indigenous aliens. To make matters worse, the Saints, environmental extremists and enemies of the Empire, have sent a fleet into the system, which means Roger and Bravo Company of the Bronze Battalion have to land secretly on the surface of Marduk, and somehow manage to trek overland to the tiny space port to call for rescue.

This book is mostly about the challenges Bravo Company faces trying to survive on Marduk and make its way halfway across the planet to get to the spaceport, and Roger's growth from a spoiled dandy into a responsible and capable military officer. Both plots are pretty interesting and handled competently, so I have nothing to complain about there. Having read a ton of military sci-fi including the always diverse Warhammer 40k universe, I'm pretty familiar with both of these plots but I at least enjoyed them. I do kind of wish, considering how darn long this particular book was, that they had gotten Roger and Bravo Company off of Marduk at the end of the book, rather than leaving them only partway to their first goal. I'm just not sure how much more different the second book can be since they'll still be making their way through the jungle, trying to get to the spaceport.

There are some signs that this is definitely Weber and Ringo's work, if only because the native fauna on Marduk has six limbs each. (Dave seems to really like giving creatures six limbs.) And the space combat felt almost like I was listening to an Honor Harrington book. Since I was actually reading an Honor Harrington book at the same time it got more than a little confusing for me because I had to remember which book I was reading!

Plus there's also the Saints who I'm sure will become more important in later books in the series but had at best a cameo in this book. The Saints are extremely militant environmentalists who are pretty much a combination of the worst parts of the People's Republic of Haven in Honor Harrington, and the bad guys in Ringo's Road to Damascus. Apparently they have chaplains whose goal is to minimize harm to the environment and override a spaceship captain's decision if it would cause too much harm. Also the Saints apparently have worlds they've actively been de-terraforming and basically run them as slave labor camps where starving political prisoners attack dandelions with wooden tools. I just feel that they're almost too cartoonishly villainous to be taken seriously, especially considering Ringo's pronounced conservative streak and Weber's strong pro-military and vaguely libertarian streak as well.

On the flip side, the protagonists definitely influence the development of several indigenous cultures on Marduk and give them access to pieces of advanced technology. The characters also mention bringing sociological adjustment teams and more advanced technology to Marduk to help integrate the native population into the empire. This is seen as a good thing but I'm not entirely sure that it is. On the one hand, there are definite benefits to bringing advanced technologies, especially medicine, to areas without as great a technological base to improve the local quality of life. On the other hand, this has a very strong imperialist ring to it and I'm not sure I like the reasons why the main characters are interested in helping the inhabitants of Marduk. It does leave me with a feeling of ambivalence regarding the book's politics.

Overall, the book is okay but there are some warning signs that it might go into some very unpleasant territory later on with crazy environmentalists. Out of the many other military sci-fi books I've read, this one was at least enjoyable. If you like this sort of crazy pulp, maybe you'll like this as well.

- Kalpar

The Road to Damascus, by John Ringo & Linda Evans

This week I'm tackling another Bolo book, but one which I had heard rumors of bad things beforehand and found myself rather worried about reading it in the first place. The Road to Damascus is cowritten by John Ringo and Linda Evans. Now, Evans has appeared on this blog before as a contributor to Bolo stories, but Ringo so far has not. From what I've been able to gather, Ringo has some fairly strong conservative political opinions which slip into some of his books, Road to Damascus included. In addition, this book clocks in at about 750 pages, nearly twice as long as any other single Bolo book in the series, which gave me serious apprehensions about going into this book. I will say that in the end it didn't turn out as bad as I thought it would be, but it still comes across to me as a little bit dumb.

Plot wise this book is also set in the days of the Final War between the Terran Concordiat and the Melconian Empire, but in this case on the distant planet of Jefferson. Located on the border between humanity's on-again off-again enemy the Deng, Jefferson merits the strategic investment of a Bolo for its protection. However, due to its remote location from the major battlefronts of the escalating Melconian War, all the Concordiat can spare is a practically antique Mark XX Bolo named Lonesome Son, and his commander Major Simon Krushtinov. Sonny and his commander prove his worth rather quickly, defeating a Deng incursion on Jefferson in the space of a few days, but at the cost of most of Jefferson's infrastructure. (This all happens within the first hundred pages, by the by.) The majority of the book is focused on the growth of a political movement known as POPPA that advocates economic and social equality for all, decreased military spending, and environmental protection. The book then follows POPPA's ascent to power, dramatic restructuring of Jefferson's social and economic fabric, and then ultimately a revolution. Deprived of his commander, Sonny becomes a tool of the increasingly corrupt POPPA regime, utilized in quashing protests and rebellions, until he finally has a change of heart at the very end of the book and joins the side of the rebels in the last ten pages. And then the book...ends. Just like that.

My apprehensions about this book were centered around Ringo's... I'll call it an attempt at political commentary which had been described to me in other reviews as strongly pro-conservative and anti-liberal. (Under current American definitions of the terms anyway.) The reason that I call it an attempt at political commentary, with some space ships and a Bolo thrown in, is that the bad guys of POPPA are never remotely anything like the Democratic party, to the point where it's practically political satire more than anything else. Towards the beginning of the book POPPA wants to basically abolish the military, enforce stronger environmental protection measures on Jefferson, and remove government investment in the reconstruction of Jefferson's agricultural and industrial economies. The military abolition looks silly simply because there's still a very real threat of Deng invasion. (And Jefferson had maintained a military despite experiencing roughly a century of peace.) The government investment in agriculture and industry just comes across as stupid, and the heroic characters flat out say as much, because people are still rebuilding from the Deng invasion, yet no one makes an effort to try and convince the masses otherwise. Like the people getting taken in by POPPA are just too stupid to understand the truth. Finally the environmental protection measures, which remain a sort of undercurrent through the book, are really an apples to oranges comparison. Jefferson is a planet with a population of ten million people, sparsely settled, and with large areas of land still not under human habitation. While it makes sense to want to protect some of that unsettled land for future generations, it's just plain dumb to try and return already terraformed land into Jeffersonian wilderness because, hey, we need that to live on. Furthermore, Jefferson isn't the only planet with humans on it in the neighborhood, nevermind the galaxy. Running out of resources isn't too much of a problem. However, in real life we have a population of over six billion on one planet with an environment that appears to be heating up considerably and an ultimately finite amount of resources. It makes sense on Earth to return unproductive and unprofitable farms back into wilderness, as some people have done, to help preserve species with less and less space to live. As a Take That to environmentalism, Road to Damascus simply doesn't work.

From there POPPA goes directly into the nightmares of pretty much any conservative in the United States and fails to reflect American politics whatsoever. A system of childhood indoctrination begins with government-mandated daycare centers, regular inspections by government agents to make sure parents are "appropriately" caring for their children with the threat of losing their children to a foster care system, increasing regulation and restriction of firearm ownership, and widespread unemployment subsistence benefits which more and more people end up on due to a slowly collapsing economy. And said "Subbies" are left with nothing better to do but create more parasites on the government treasury. Certainly what Fox News claims is happening in the United States, but again, in no way a reflection of reality. Ringo then starts going into Soviet and Chinese agricultural collectivism where farms are taken over by the government, farmers are demonized as profiteering off of high food prices and hoarding food, and farmers are forced to work a minimum of fifty hours on state-run collective farms. Eventually a police state is established with its own paramilitary arm, any and all forms of dissent are brutally crushed, and work camps are established to hold the growing number of convicts. Pretty much every terrifying and awful thing gets thrown in until POPPA goes full-blown Nazi with actual, literal death camps, a "final solution" genocide, and plans to expand their regime to other planets. The result is like a slippery slope argument that just comes across as dumb more than anything like an actual commentary on American politics.

Ultimately the book just seems to play out like persecution porn for conservatives. I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that in real life conservatives are probably one of the least-persecuted groups in the United States. In fact, I think in some cases the conservatives are often the persecutors. However, nothing stirs up righteous indignation more than a good persecution story, which is why Fox News is still around. The Road to Damascus just reads as a story where dangerous, out-of-control liberals are out to completely ruin the world and it's only through the resistance of brave, gun-toting conservatives that the world is saved. There's even an Easy Evangelism moment where one of the characters slaps her POPPA-brainwashed daughter and shouts how everything's wrong with POPPA and her daughter pretty much instantly believes her. I'm almost left wondering who the heck this book is meant for because it's got all the traces of persecution porn, but I don't know how many conservatives are going to pick up a book about robot tanks.

Well ostensibly about robot tanks. The reviews that I had looked at before reading this had also mentioned that Sonny the Bolo was barely in the book. I feel like he's certainly in it enough to be a main character, but he doesn't seem to do terribly much. He does an excellent job of ending the Deng incursion on Jefferson, but spends most of the book sitting on his shiny behind wondering why anyone would listen to POPPA's demonstrably false manifesto and why POPPA would take actions which will destroy the planet's economy in six point seven years or so. Sonny feels no obligation to inform anyone of these facts (although they probably wouldn't listen anyway) and when he does get out of the maintenance depot, whether to crush some protestors in the streets, literally, or fight against some rebels, he comes across as not terribly clever. Now, there might be some leeway since he's a Mark XX Bolo and therefore of the first types to be fully sentient, but it's explicitly stated that Sonny's as good as a Mark XXIV or XXV because of his century of field experience to call on. But time and again he keeps getting outsmarted by the rebels and stumbles into their traps, making you seriously doubt his effectiveness as a Bolo. I think the title, The Road to Damascus, is supposed to be a reference to Sonny's ultimate conversion to the rebel cause because he realizes POPPA was committing genocide and simply "following orders" isn't good enough, but while we get to see Paul's work after his conversion on the road to Damascus, the book ends right after Sonny's conversion. It's ultimately very disappointing.

Finally, for a book that's nearly 800 pages, Ringo somehow manages to make me want him to show rather than tell. Important events are often described to the reader, rather than actually happening. For example when one of the main characters is assumed dead, the eulogy which practically canonizes her as a saint of the farmers resisting POPPA, it's described as incredibly moving instead of actually being written. There are dozens of examples like this throughout the book and while some exist to let the horrors of POPPA be left to the reader's imagination, it feels just plain lazy most of the time. In addition, the book has quite a few time jumps, which are necessary to an extent because the book's set over twenty years, but this feeds back into the telling instead of showing where we're told characters have developed over time instead of getting to see that development for ourselves. In addition, the book is divided into four parts, which do not in any way correspond with any developments in the book. It reads like one big long novel instead of a story told in four acts. It just further adds to the frustration with the book when it's already clearly persecution porn.

To its credit, the book is at least readable through the first five hundred pages or so. It wasn't until I got towards the end that I just wanted the book to be over already. But for the most part, this is probably the one Bolo book you can probably safely skip. As I've said in other reviews, when the Bolo series tries to talk about bigger issues it always seems to fall incredibly short. The Road to Damascus is no exception. It feels like an attempt at political commentary that's really conservative persecution porn with a Bolo thrown in from time to time. It's certainly proof I'm dumb enough to read anything with spaceships in it, but nowhere close to the fun, gripping, pulp action that made me fall in love with the Bolo series in the first place. Definitely not worth your time and can be safely skipped.

- Kalpar