In Death Ground & The Shiva Option

So I’ve decide to do the review of these two books together seeing as they are basically the continuation of the same narrative merely with a book cover in between. You’ll listen to one straight after the other if you have any sense, just as I did, so one review should cover both.

First off, we’re 3 books into the series, so I’ll assume you know the basics about the high level of head jumping and huge variety of character perspectives that are used to accurately portray the wide-reaching events that White and Weber write about. Can it still be as jarring as it was in the previous novels? Yes. But as before, if you can get used to it, it’s a brilliant method of conveying the huge amounts of information involved in the content of these hard-sci-fi military novels. If you like the tiny, realistic minutia of these fictional future conflicts, then this is possibly the best style to portray it in. Now on to the content itself.

These two books come in at 46 hours combined and cover roughly 10 years within the Starfire universe, and what they cover is the Fourth Interstellar War that was illuded to in Book 1 (if you read the series in publishing order), otherwise known as the Arachnid War. Thus far, White and Weber have done a brilliant job of fleshing out the alien species in their universe. The Thebans and the Orions have been crafted in great detail, and we get a good look at the other two members of the alliance in this book, the Gorm and the Ophinuchi. Not as detailed as the others, mind, but still a much greater understating of the races that have only been mentioned in passing before. However, it’s the portrayal of the race of carnivorous, hive-minded, unstoppable killing machines that are the Arachnids that completely steels the show in these books. We as listeners and readers are treated to the single-minded perspective of this devouring swarm in all its terrible, logical beauty. They are a race that feel no emotions, create no art, are entirely uncomprehending of any aspects of what we humans (and by extension, those alien species that are similar to us) would call culture. The bugs have a single purpose. Survive. And any organism that is not them is to be consumed and either destroyed or rendered into a form that fits the need of the hivemind. Morality, honour, remorse. These are concepts that the Arachnids simply cannot comprehend, both in themselves or others. They have no concept of them, and their beautifully detached indifference that is portrayed in these books is fantastic at showing the inner workings of a truly alien race. It’s fantastic. I have a weird blind-spot in my usual unshakable shields to the horrors portrayed in fictional worlds. Very, very little will ever shake me these days, but one thing that will is sentient beings becoming livestock, having full knowledge that they and the people they love are going to be rounded up and one by one taken away to be eaten. It got me in John Ringo’s fantastic Legacy of the Aldenata series, and it gets me again here. And as ever, anything that can elicit a true and deep emotional response from me after so many years of ingesting every nightmare that fictional universes can throw is worthy of my praise.

Now on to a not so good point about these books. They drag on… and on… and on. Yes, I love a space battle, and yes, I love the realistic manner in which White and Weber portray them, but holy hell there are a lot of them in these books. Loads and loads and load, and not enough difference between them to make them really stand out, particularly in Book 2. Now don’t get me wrong, there are some truly awesome battles, protracted campaigns that grind the participants down both physically and mentally in a wonderful example of brilliant writing. But there are also a lot of others that end up just tumbling away into the aether and take a long time to get through. One after another after another that can get a little tedious. Now objectively, this is a bad thing regarding writing quality. However, it has another effect which, as I think back on it, is an amazing tool for improving immersion within the universe. Put simply, by the end of the war, we as listeners are just as haggard and jaded by the conflict as those fighting it. We’ve been there with them through every fight, every disaster, every warp-point assault and planetary bombardment. We feel that we too have been fighting side by side with these people every step, and this gives us a truly deeper understanding of how it has changed the characters within.

As usual, there isn’t a huge amount of deep character development in these books when compared to others. Or at least when measured against a comparable word count from other series. Yes, there absolutely are some truly wonderful examples of good character arcs, taken in snippets as this writing style does, but by three books in you know whether you like this style of writing or not, and I for one certainly do.

In short, these books are a marathon where the previous books have seemed more a sprint (at least in comparison to one another), but it’s a damned rewarding one when you finally cross the finish line.

Narration, as ever, is fantastic. I can never get over the skill with which Marc Vietor portrays the alien voices, particularly the Orions. Great job.

Personal Score: 4 stars

Professional Score: 3.75 stars