Okay... I guess that's an ending.
Sep. 4th, 2003 03:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothI read 'The Shiva Option',by Weber and... er... White, I think. It was a fairly perfunctory effort. There were no major surprises or plot twists, except for the introduction of an alien empire to explain why the enemies suddenly morphed from unstoppable doom in 'On Death Ground' to wimpy pushovers whose only effective weapon was suicide gunboats.
The eponymous 'Shiva Option' was the enemy's reaction to having a few dozen billion of their citizens killed, which made genocide an attractive tactical ploy as well as a satisfying revenge. Satisfying for the characters, at least... like everything else in the book, description was beyond minimal -- most battles were summarized ('They'd won, but at what cost! 9 monitors, 12 superdreadnoughts, 47 battlecruisers, and 2,316 fighters had been lost...').
But, really, the enemy just got weaker and weaker as time went on, and never even TRIED a counter-offensive, so the whole thing was an extended anticlimax.
The eponymous 'Shiva Option' was the enemy's reaction to having a few dozen billion of their citizens killed, which made genocide an attractive tactical ploy as well as a satisfying revenge. Satisfying for the characters, at least... like everything else in the book, description was beyond minimal -- most battles were summarized ('They'd won, but at what cost! 9 monitors, 12 superdreadnoughts, 47 battlecruisers, and 2,316 fighters had been lost...').
But, really, the enemy just got weaker and weaker as time went on, and never even TRIED a counter-offensive, so the whole thing was an extended anticlimax.
