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Invasion #1-3
Invasion: The complete three book set
More than a decade after the Confederated Earth Forces were defeated, their commanding general, a boyhood protegee, lives in exile and disgrace. His life on an isolated farm is forever changed when two strangers show up at his homestead, and the war comes crashing back down on him. The problem though, remains the same. How do you fight an enemy that is technologically superior and holds the high ground? This anthology contains all three Invasion Resistance, Day of Battle, and Total War.
619 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 14, 2018
About the author
J.F. Holmes
82 books77 followersJ.F. Holmes is a retired Army Senior Noncomissioned Officer, having served for 22 years in both the Regular Army and Army National Guard. During that time, he served as everything from an artillery section leader to a member of a Division level planning staff, with tours in Cuba and Iraq, as well as responding to the terrorists attacks in NYC on 9-11.
From 2010 to 2014 he wrote the immensely popular military cartoon strip, "Power Point Ranger", poking fun at military life in the tradition of Beetle Bailey and Willy & Joe.
His books range from Military Sci-Fi to Space Opera to Detective to Fantasy, with a lot in between, and in 2017 two are finalists for the prestigious Dragon Awards. As of August 2017, Mr. Holmes has eighteen books and two novellas published.
Feel free to join Irregular Scout Team One on Facebook, and get a chance to influence the course and plot of his next book!
https://www.facebook.com/groups/15294...
From 2010 to 2014 he wrote the immensely popular military cartoon strip, "Power Point Ranger", poking fun at military life in the tradition of Beetle Bailey and Willy & Joe.
His books range from Military Sci-Fi to Space Opera to Detective to Fantasy, with a lot in between, and in 2017 two are finalists for the prestigious Dragon Awards. As of August 2017, Mr. Holmes has eighteen books and two novellas published.
Feel free to join Irregular Scout Team One on Facebook, and get a chance to influence the course and plot of his next book!
https://www.facebook.com/groups/15294...
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Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 25, 2022
I'll admit, I had a hard time trying to decide whether to give this story one star or two because of the handful of good things I can say. On the other hand, I literally developed a migraine while writing this review, so perhaps I feel more strongly about it than I anticipated. I enjoyed the story going in, though some bits made me scratch my head, and somewhat uncomfortable. Those headscratching and uncomfortable moments only grew and grew as time wore on, and I found myself hating the books by the end. Invasion is an intriguing premise that is slowly torn apart over the course of three books with inconsistencies, poor writing choices, and disturbing politics. What started as an attempt at realism quickly fell into a conga line of writing that would be better suited to reddit threads. What we get is very different from what I expected. Instead of an entertaining sci-fi story of overcoming odds, we get an uncomfortably immature dreary story espousing conservative ideas ranging from homegrown “survival of the fittest” ideas to a bizarre endorsement of the Japanese emperor.
To start off, this series has an interesting premise; what exactly do you do if you lose the orbitals in an alien invasion? The backstory is basically X-COM crossed with Ender's Game. Technologically inferior near-future Earth discovers an incoming alien invasion, and rapidly works to build up technology to fight with. They try to use child geniuses to help coordinate, come up with some creative ideas, and to command the space fleet. This ultimately fails and the aliens bomb us into the stone age, and twenty years later guerillas and surviving militaries make an attempt to take back Earth. This is where the headscratching starts, but one can argue Ender’s Game did it, and makes me wonder if this will work out. I hadn't considered the possibility of using nuclear submarines to hit back at the enemy when the space forces have been defeated, for instance. There are also certain political decisions that I suppose make sense, where the ground forces have to beg for funding and supplies because their leaders think space is all that matters.
I was drawn in by the intriguing subversion of the inferior human technology against the aliens. Instead of winning, the humans get resoundingly beaten. I wanted to know where the story would go from here. It’s a concept we don’t often see, and the tools being laid out to resist are fascinating. Small resistance bands equipped with contingency plans for this possibility link up with old war heroes, and even one of the human spaceships survives. This makes a good point that some sci-fi misses. Even if you overthrow the enemy on the planet’s surface, the invaders can bomb you from orbit.
The headscratching moments and discomfort come from the poor writing choices, worldbuilding, and the obvious right-wing preaching. It felt like we changed writers when book 2 and 3 hit. I noticed a significant speedbump in a scene that's ripped right out of an annoying video game level. A timed mission to rescue scientists(the type isn't specified, just "scientists"). This wasn’t as if a different writer took over, it’s as if the writer stopped being edited. It's very clearly the same voice, but without any of the elements that drew me in.
I don’t have a problem with art being political. All art is political. I have a problem with the politics endorsed by this story. That is very different.
The right wing talking points are obvious throughout the story. There's a heavy atmosphere of hemming and hawing over exposing young people to death, but ultimately doesn't seem to think it's a big deal. There is a scene of human children being brainwashed by the alien schools that comes across less like a commentary on Native American boarding schools and more like "why didn't X minority fight back", and of course, "schools are brainwashing your children and making them gay".
There is also an incredibly bizarre attempt to show how they're rebuilding the government by having a guy ride around the countryside to surviving communities and explaining the basics of a town council to them. It's a statement about organization, and comes across more like "these weak-kneed city slickers don't know how to live".
I have a problem with a story that seems to relish in death, and especially embraces right wing death worship. The characters we are supposed to root for routinely, I repeat, routinely kill their own wounded people as a “mercy”. This is a war crime. Say what you will about the Geneva Conventions, if you agree with them or not; many would argue that since Earth’s survival is on the line, playing nice doesn’t matter, and the bad guys are aliens anyway.
I must emphasize that these are not the bad guys they’re killing, they are not prisoners, these are their own soldiers, and in one case, their own children. A teenager is murdered because he was badly wounded and they didn’t believe they could treat him. This is sick. Especially as it directly leads to his mother committing suicide.
A rebuttal to the insistence that this is war and we can't play nice is that is that refraining from executing prisoners, and refusing to butcher wounded, and refusing to use immoral weapons that cause needless suffering are not weaknesses. Being hurt gives you the right to justice, not revenge. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. Rejection of rules of war doesn't make you strong, and the idea of doing what needs to be done is in the eye of the beholder. Most of all, rejecting rules of war makes one appear as if they deliberately want to inflict pain on others. That is not a positive character trait, that is not heroic. We have a word for that. It's called being villainous. The only reason why they're the good guys in this narrative is because the bad guys are barely a step above Nazis, causing billions of deaths and taking over the world.
Not to mention that the people concluding these characters are doomed and should be immediately euthanized are not medics of any kind. They are special forces, but usually in a story, special forces medical training is used to save a character's life or show that they're dead. It is not traditionally used as a go-ahead to execute someone.
One such executioner is an ultra masculine soldier who is assigned to help rescue a resistance leader who doesn't want to join them. The masculine soldier's lover gets wounded protecting the leader, as in, doing her job, and instead of being angry at high command, or the aliens, the masculine soldier becomes hell bent on revenge against the man they were escorting. The character is portrayed as being in the wrong here, but it seems like he’s only portrayed that way because the person he was escorting is the hero of the story, and otherwise he’s acceptable. You'll forgive me if I'm not lenient on the character who, aside from wanting revenge that makes no sense, is otherwise perfectly in line with the book's philosophy. I suppose he’s supposed to be one of the author’s avatars. Considering he already stole one video game trope, lots of players get angry at the subject of escort missions. Unfortunately for the author, this does not apply to the real world.
The cast show more respect for the dead than they do for the living. They comment that they'll recover the dead bodies of spacers left drifting around the solar system. Given the attitudes the same characters have about the living, it reminds me less of decent burials and more of a line from Tolkien regarding Gondor's decline, "Kings built tombs more splendid than the houses of the living and counted the names of their descent dearer than the names of their sons."
The writer clearly watches too much anime. They say that with all the leadership in Japan wiped out, the emperor was the only one left. They then sent out messengers to ask surviving communities if they were cool with being run by an absolute monarchy. The last time an emperor ruled over Japan with anything resembling an absolute monarchy was Imperial Japan, a state I feel I should not have to explain was monstrous. They were not something to aspire to. The empress we get in the story also ends up somehow being a fighter pilot who uses a sword in combat. With this book's pretensions to realism, I wouldn't expect a combination of ripping off Independence Day and an anime cliche. That's so far from realistic that I'm pretty sure the Cheshire Cat and White Rabbit just wandered past laughing.
There is also a bizarre and out of nowhere scene where Texas suddenly secedes from the United States after it’s been freed by the resistance. While that does not seem to be an inaccurate assessment of some more radical residents of Texas, I think the entire planet might have a problem with people suddenly deciding to disunite when the bodies of the oppressors aren't even cold and half the planet is still dominated by them.
It is very clear the writer had read far too much of John Ringo's work before writing this. John Ringo, as horrible, ultra-conservative, and borderline totalitarian his work can be, you can find at least one good thing to say about his work; he occasionally manages to scrape out a good science fiction idea once in a while. In his Legacy of the Aldenata series, aircraft are not used because of the enemy's anti-aircraft weapons, and thus, battleships are used. Not only does that make a certain amount of sense, the characters develop tactics to get around the problem. That does not in any way excuse Ringo's reprehensible writing, and while I do not accuse this writer of being like him, I accuse him of borrowing from Ringo's work without even understanding the point. In Ringo’s work, it’s a little silly, but they establish a very good reason why they can’t use aircraft, and thus, they use battleships. It’s silly, but it’s internally consistent. Battleships are used in Invasion purely because the author thinks they’re cool. Battleships are machines that require an atrocious amount of staff, and are being used in a setting where human beings, let alone those skilled enough to operate ships, are much rarer, and where they don't have any of the anti aircraft gun problems. We see aircraft being used plenty of times, as well as ground-based artillery. The aliens have no naval vessels, which is the primary reason battleships were invented in the first place, not merely for shore bombardment. Therefore, there is absolutely no reason to use battleships. A major reason aircraft carriers dominate the world is because they're more versatile and cheaper than battleships. A carrier can strike inland much farther than a battleship.
The scenes with the battleships are one of the biggest problems I have with the story. The resistance decided to recruit a man who stepped out of a 1950s sci-fi novel to command the fleet. He's an irritating old man who filled me with so much disgust. He's every older boomer you meet at the grocery store who believes he is making a stand against what he sees as young people's moral degradation and it's up to him to fix it. He is an older man, yes, but I wouldn't expect a joke about not being used to women serving on a naval vessel from a character supposedly raised in the 21st century. Of all the sexist comments I'd expect, I didn't expect one like that. I didn't expect this same man to grumble about personnel shortages in a setting where most of humanity is dead, nor did I expect him to grab some random young man to educate about the importance of a logbook which A, any sailor should know about, and B, still has not been phased out of the navy as the book suggests. Any google search will turn up these logs.
Speaking of things that don't make sense, let's circle back around to the Ender's Game elements. They fully lampshade how ridiculous the idea is, even referencing the book by name claiming someone at DARPA read too much of it. Yet arguably the main character of the story is this former child soldier they put in charge of the space fleet. Ender’s Game used children because they had generations of time, the entire planet to draw on, and advanced science to try and find someone like Napoleon. In this setting, they had a few years to prepare, and near-modern technology to deal with. This makes absolutely no sense as a realistic approach to the situation. No first world government in their right mind would accept this, and no military on the planet would accept a supreme commander who’s barely old enough to shave. If they needed people who understood space, and were adaptable enough to understand new technologies, we have hundreds of astronauts to choose from. Many astronauts have military backgrounds, it’s not uncommon for some of them to have command experience during war time scenarios. If they needed people who understood science fiction for whatever reason, astronauts are some of the biggest nerds out there.
These are some of the novel's biggest problems. Not in terms of it as politics, but how their pretensions to realism, the world building, and the writing actively hurt it as a story. Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven wrote Footfall, a book from the 80s with problematic politics, but a fascinating look at a similar situation. With Footfall, if you can get past the surface dated elements, you can appreciate the sci-fi elements, consistencies, and problem solving. With Invasion, this is most certainly not the case.
Invasion at first appears to be sci-fi fun, but underneath desperately wants to be up there with Ender's Game and Footfall as a sci-fi great. Yet it's undercut by its constant attempts to pander to both realism and more fanciful rule of cool. I am not saying you cannot do both. I am saying that in this book, they get in the way of one another. I am saying that stories need to be internally consistent. Within their own world the stories don't work. The story is not internally consistent. There is absolutely no reason why conventional battleships would be used in a conflict like this. They establish they have ground based artillery and aircraft that can be used to much greater effect than a battleship, and much cheaper. In Pacific Rim, you can buy the use of giant robots because it's advertised on the front cover, and it's not meant to be super serious. In Invasion, realistic approaches to defeating orbital weaponry are what's advertised on the front cover. We are not seeing the equivalent of a slightly older fighter jet fighting a brand new one. This is the equivalent of a rapier being used on a modern battlefield and expecting to survive. Hm, perhaps that's why the author appears to participate in worshipping the Japanese emperor. The Empire of Japan was quite fond of sending their officers into battle with swords in the Second World War, and most of them were killed doing that.
The book is written in the vein of confusing fresh and new with surprising the audience. I'd say that this is like school age fanfiction, but I've read and written high school fanfiction, and that's inaccurate. The problem is not the writing itself. The Lost Regiment is a story where the writing, as in the text and grammar itself, isn't that great, but it's got a compelling story. The Dark Knight Returns, a critically lauded comic, is badly drawn. The problem does not necessarily lie in the grammar if it's passable and it has a good story. The problem here lies in the story. It meanders around without a clear direction in sight. It attempts to be The Longest Day without understanding what made that story good. When it finally reached the end one is dissatisfied and confused.
I present this review to explain why you should not check out this series. It is not good. It’s tempting on the surface, I know, that’s what I thought going in. It is internally inconsistent, the characters are flat, and I did not have a good time. This was not what I expected to get going in.
To start off, this series has an interesting premise; what exactly do you do if you lose the orbitals in an alien invasion? The backstory is basically X-COM crossed with Ender's Game. Technologically inferior near-future Earth discovers an incoming alien invasion, and rapidly works to build up technology to fight with. They try to use child geniuses to help coordinate, come up with some creative ideas, and to command the space fleet. This ultimately fails and the aliens bomb us into the stone age, and twenty years later guerillas and surviving militaries make an attempt to take back Earth. This is where the headscratching starts, but one can argue Ender’s Game did it, and makes me wonder if this will work out. I hadn't considered the possibility of using nuclear submarines to hit back at the enemy when the space forces have been defeated, for instance. There are also certain political decisions that I suppose make sense, where the ground forces have to beg for funding and supplies because their leaders think space is all that matters.
I was drawn in by the intriguing subversion of the inferior human technology against the aliens. Instead of winning, the humans get resoundingly beaten. I wanted to know where the story would go from here. It’s a concept we don’t often see, and the tools being laid out to resist are fascinating. Small resistance bands equipped with contingency plans for this possibility link up with old war heroes, and even one of the human spaceships survives. This makes a good point that some sci-fi misses. Even if you overthrow the enemy on the planet’s surface, the invaders can bomb you from orbit.
The headscratching moments and discomfort come from the poor writing choices, worldbuilding, and the obvious right-wing preaching. It felt like we changed writers when book 2 and 3 hit. I noticed a significant speedbump in a scene that's ripped right out of an annoying video game level. A timed mission to rescue scientists(the type isn't specified, just "scientists"). This wasn’t as if a different writer took over, it’s as if the writer stopped being edited. It's very clearly the same voice, but without any of the elements that drew me in.
I don’t have a problem with art being political. All art is political. I have a problem with the politics endorsed by this story. That is very different.
The right wing talking points are obvious throughout the story. There's a heavy atmosphere of hemming and hawing over exposing young people to death, but ultimately doesn't seem to think it's a big deal. There is a scene of human children being brainwashed by the alien schools that comes across less like a commentary on Native American boarding schools and more like "why didn't X minority fight back", and of course, "schools are brainwashing your children and making them gay".
There is also an incredibly bizarre attempt to show how they're rebuilding the government by having a guy ride around the countryside to surviving communities and explaining the basics of a town council to them. It's a statement about organization, and comes across more like "these weak-kneed city slickers don't know how to live".
I have a problem with a story that seems to relish in death, and especially embraces right wing death worship. The characters we are supposed to root for routinely, I repeat, routinely kill their own wounded people as a “mercy”. This is a war crime. Say what you will about the Geneva Conventions, if you agree with them or not; many would argue that since Earth’s survival is on the line, playing nice doesn’t matter, and the bad guys are aliens anyway.
I must emphasize that these are not the bad guys they’re killing, they are not prisoners, these are their own soldiers, and in one case, their own children. A teenager is murdered because he was badly wounded and they didn’t believe they could treat him. This is sick. Especially as it directly leads to his mother committing suicide.
A rebuttal to the insistence that this is war and we can't play nice is that is that refraining from executing prisoners, and refusing to butcher wounded, and refusing to use immoral weapons that cause needless suffering are not weaknesses. Being hurt gives you the right to justice, not revenge. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. Rejection of rules of war doesn't make you strong, and the idea of doing what needs to be done is in the eye of the beholder. Most of all, rejecting rules of war makes one appear as if they deliberately want to inflict pain on others. That is not a positive character trait, that is not heroic. We have a word for that. It's called being villainous. The only reason why they're the good guys in this narrative is because the bad guys are barely a step above Nazis, causing billions of deaths and taking over the world.
Not to mention that the people concluding these characters are doomed and should be immediately euthanized are not medics of any kind. They are special forces, but usually in a story, special forces medical training is used to save a character's life or show that they're dead. It is not traditionally used as a go-ahead to execute someone.
One such executioner is an ultra masculine soldier who is assigned to help rescue a resistance leader who doesn't want to join them. The masculine soldier's lover gets wounded protecting the leader, as in, doing her job, and instead of being angry at high command, or the aliens, the masculine soldier becomes hell bent on revenge against the man they were escorting. The character is portrayed as being in the wrong here, but it seems like he’s only portrayed that way because the person he was escorting is the hero of the story, and otherwise he’s acceptable. You'll forgive me if I'm not lenient on the character who, aside from wanting revenge that makes no sense, is otherwise perfectly in line with the book's philosophy. I suppose he’s supposed to be one of the author’s avatars. Considering he already stole one video game trope, lots of players get angry at the subject of escort missions. Unfortunately for the author, this does not apply to the real world.
The cast show more respect for the dead than they do for the living. They comment that they'll recover the dead bodies of spacers left drifting around the solar system. Given the attitudes the same characters have about the living, it reminds me less of decent burials and more of a line from Tolkien regarding Gondor's decline, "Kings built tombs more splendid than the houses of the living and counted the names of their descent dearer than the names of their sons."
The writer clearly watches too much anime. They say that with all the leadership in Japan wiped out, the emperor was the only one left. They then sent out messengers to ask surviving communities if they were cool with being run by an absolute monarchy. The last time an emperor ruled over Japan with anything resembling an absolute monarchy was Imperial Japan, a state I feel I should not have to explain was monstrous. They were not something to aspire to. The empress we get in the story also ends up somehow being a fighter pilot who uses a sword in combat. With this book's pretensions to realism, I wouldn't expect a combination of ripping off Independence Day and an anime cliche. That's so far from realistic that I'm pretty sure the Cheshire Cat and White Rabbit just wandered past laughing.
There is also a bizarre and out of nowhere scene where Texas suddenly secedes from the United States after it’s been freed by the resistance. While that does not seem to be an inaccurate assessment of some more radical residents of Texas, I think the entire planet might have a problem with people suddenly deciding to disunite when the bodies of the oppressors aren't even cold and half the planet is still dominated by them.
It is very clear the writer had read far too much of John Ringo's work before writing this. John Ringo, as horrible, ultra-conservative, and borderline totalitarian his work can be, you can find at least one good thing to say about his work; he occasionally manages to scrape out a good science fiction idea once in a while. In his Legacy of the Aldenata series, aircraft are not used because of the enemy's anti-aircraft weapons, and thus, battleships are used. Not only does that make a certain amount of sense, the characters develop tactics to get around the problem. That does not in any way excuse Ringo's reprehensible writing, and while I do not accuse this writer of being like him, I accuse him of borrowing from Ringo's work without even understanding the point. In Ringo’s work, it’s a little silly, but they establish a very good reason why they can’t use aircraft, and thus, they use battleships. It’s silly, but it’s internally consistent. Battleships are used in Invasion purely because the author thinks they’re cool. Battleships are machines that require an atrocious amount of staff, and are being used in a setting where human beings, let alone those skilled enough to operate ships, are much rarer, and where they don't have any of the anti aircraft gun problems. We see aircraft being used plenty of times, as well as ground-based artillery. The aliens have no naval vessels, which is the primary reason battleships were invented in the first place, not merely for shore bombardment. Therefore, there is absolutely no reason to use battleships. A major reason aircraft carriers dominate the world is because they're more versatile and cheaper than battleships. A carrier can strike inland much farther than a battleship.
The scenes with the battleships are one of the biggest problems I have with the story. The resistance decided to recruit a man who stepped out of a 1950s sci-fi novel to command the fleet. He's an irritating old man who filled me with so much disgust. He's every older boomer you meet at the grocery store who believes he is making a stand against what he sees as young people's moral degradation and it's up to him to fix it. He is an older man, yes, but I wouldn't expect a joke about not being used to women serving on a naval vessel from a character supposedly raised in the 21st century. Of all the sexist comments I'd expect, I didn't expect one like that. I didn't expect this same man to grumble about personnel shortages in a setting where most of humanity is dead, nor did I expect him to grab some random young man to educate about the importance of a logbook which A, any sailor should know about, and B, still has not been phased out of the navy as the book suggests. Any google search will turn up these logs.
Speaking of things that don't make sense, let's circle back around to the Ender's Game elements. They fully lampshade how ridiculous the idea is, even referencing the book by name claiming someone at DARPA read too much of it. Yet arguably the main character of the story is this former child soldier they put in charge of the space fleet. Ender’s Game used children because they had generations of time, the entire planet to draw on, and advanced science to try and find someone like Napoleon. In this setting, they had a few years to prepare, and near-modern technology to deal with. This makes absolutely no sense as a realistic approach to the situation. No first world government in their right mind would accept this, and no military on the planet would accept a supreme commander who’s barely old enough to shave. If they needed people who understood space, and were adaptable enough to understand new technologies, we have hundreds of astronauts to choose from. Many astronauts have military backgrounds, it’s not uncommon for some of them to have command experience during war time scenarios. If they needed people who understood science fiction for whatever reason, astronauts are some of the biggest nerds out there.
These are some of the novel's biggest problems. Not in terms of it as politics, but how their pretensions to realism, the world building, and the writing actively hurt it as a story. Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven wrote Footfall, a book from the 80s with problematic politics, but a fascinating look at a similar situation. With Footfall, if you can get past the surface dated elements, you can appreciate the sci-fi elements, consistencies, and problem solving. With Invasion, this is most certainly not the case.
Invasion at first appears to be sci-fi fun, but underneath desperately wants to be up there with Ender's Game and Footfall as a sci-fi great. Yet it's undercut by its constant attempts to pander to both realism and more fanciful rule of cool. I am not saying you cannot do both. I am saying that in this book, they get in the way of one another. I am saying that stories need to be internally consistent. Within their own world the stories don't work. The story is not internally consistent. There is absolutely no reason why conventional battleships would be used in a conflict like this. They establish they have ground based artillery and aircraft that can be used to much greater effect than a battleship, and much cheaper. In Pacific Rim, you can buy the use of giant robots because it's advertised on the front cover, and it's not meant to be super serious. In Invasion, realistic approaches to defeating orbital weaponry are what's advertised on the front cover. We are not seeing the equivalent of a slightly older fighter jet fighting a brand new one. This is the equivalent of a rapier being used on a modern battlefield and expecting to survive. Hm, perhaps that's why the author appears to participate in worshipping the Japanese emperor. The Empire of Japan was quite fond of sending their officers into battle with swords in the Second World War, and most of them were killed doing that.
The book is written in the vein of confusing fresh and new with surprising the audience. I'd say that this is like school age fanfiction, but I've read and written high school fanfiction, and that's inaccurate. The problem is not the writing itself. The Lost Regiment is a story where the writing, as in the text and grammar itself, isn't that great, but it's got a compelling story. The Dark Knight Returns, a critically lauded comic, is badly drawn. The problem does not necessarily lie in the grammar if it's passable and it has a good story. The problem here lies in the story. It meanders around without a clear direction in sight. It attempts to be The Longest Day without understanding what made that story good. When it finally reached the end one is dissatisfied and confused.
I present this review to explain why you should not check out this series. It is not good. It’s tempting on the surface, I know, that’s what I thought going in. It is internally inconsistent, the characters are flat, and I did not have a good time. This was not what I expected to get going in.
May 11, 2019
Good SciFi; OK Writing; TERRIBLE Math!!!
You’d expect a SciFi writer to at least know the basics of interplanetary distances in our own Solar System ... but, no, THIS AUTHOR can’t seem to keep it straight ... first something is out by the orbit of Neptune, THEN at another time it’s a million kilometers away ... then, who knows?!? (It’s pretty distressing to see these inaccuracies, when at other times the book is keeping you adequately amused.)
There is A LOT of military shoot-em-up and carnage in this book series. But, truly, you need to read all 3 stories back-to-back, or you’ll never know what happens. There is not much background or details on the Invaders, and the ‘Wolverines’ is left vague enough to terrify you, but the Reader just never gets a clear picture, for instance, as to how they (or the Dragons) can actually manipulate guns, vehicles, or any other ‘normal’ thing — yet, they can conquer worlds and frighten whoever is left on good ol’ Earth.
This COULD have been a 5-star Review if the author had a made a serious attempt to understand math and distances; since he clearly just threw numbers out there, how is the Reader supposed to believe anything else?!?
You’d expect a SciFi writer to at least know the basics of interplanetary distances in our own Solar System ... but, no, THIS AUTHOR can’t seem to keep it straight ... first something is out by the orbit of Neptune, THEN at another time it’s a million kilometers away ... then, who knows?!? (It’s pretty distressing to see these inaccuracies, when at other times the book is keeping you adequately amused.)
There is A LOT of military shoot-em-up and carnage in this book series. But, truly, you need to read all 3 stories back-to-back, or you’ll never know what happens. There is not much background or details on the Invaders, and the ‘Wolverines’ is left vague enough to terrify you, but the Reader just never gets a clear picture, for instance, as to how they (or the Dragons) can actually manipulate guns, vehicles, or any other ‘normal’ thing — yet, they can conquer worlds and frighten whoever is left on good ol’ Earth.
This COULD have been a 5-star Review if the author had a made a serious attempt to understand math and distances; since he clearly just threw numbers out there, how is the Reader supposed to believe anything else?!?
November 15, 2021
Not so much 'Invasion' more like 'Invaded'. The humans are decimated and the aliens are totally in charge - except for a fair chunk of the military that went to ground to bide their time. Ten years on the aliens are getting a bit complacent.
I liked the various type aliens and the concept of conventional weapons against the alien mega weapons. The generic skirmishes went on for a bit too long but there were enough twists to keep me happy.
All in all, a satisfying take on the the olde alien invasion genre.
I liked the various type aliens and the concept of conventional weapons against the alien mega weapons. The generic skirmishes went on for a bit too long but there were enough twists to keep me happy.
All in all, a satisfying take on the the olde alien invasion genre.
January 28, 2022
A very good Military Space Opera
The story was great, the characters were excellent and as flawed as anyone else, and the story ended as it should have, although, there is more than enough room for a sequel...
The story was great, the characters were excellent and as flawed as anyone else, and the story ended as it should have, although, there is more than enough room for a sequel...
October 9, 2019
I would have given it 5 stars except it was never explained, nor did it make sense that David took off for Shian Mt. without telling anyone where and why he was going.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews