When the Devil Dances (Hardcover)

John Ringo joins such recent Sci Fi heavy hitters as David Weber and Eric Flint and joins the ranks of such military SF'ers as David Drake - Hammer's Slammers, Pournelle - John Christian Falkenberg, and Keith Laumer - Bolo's. This series is highly recommended.

My complaints from previous books in this series remain: The deux ex machina rescues are back, and the technology still has magic performance. Now, I realize that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," but a little explanation of how, for instance, soldiers can wield what are, in essence, heavy-duty mass-driver hoses yet not suffer recoil forces would be interesting. Some fairly obvious tactical screws-up exist, too. For instance, the GalTech Aid (personal computer/secretary/librarian/etc.) can produce an impenetrable reactionless shield, but yet no one bothers to use them as such in combat. What's with that? Instead, they use them as pop-up land mines, with the force field flipping on and off in unrestrained mode to slice the Posleen into gobbets of dripping yellow meat. Now that's a nifty, nasty, and believable innovation, but how come everyone's forgotten to use these same screens in their originally-intended mode?

One especially jarring element is the Rah-Rah cheer leading for the online comic Sluggy Freelance, and in particular, for Bun-bun the homicidal mini-lop rabbit. While I enjoy Sluggy very much, and have been reading it for years, I find the over-the-top evangelical enthusiasm of Ringo for Sluggy to be annoying and distracting.

To the good, many of the stronger points of the previous books are retained. Sympathetic characters still die. Human resourcefulness in the face of overwhelming odds is still the order of the day, and shows up all over the place. There is more focus on the civil effects of living under the threat of extinction, and it's not pretty. Ringo has done a nice job of showing the Law of Unintended Consequences here, where pre-invasion political considerations & shortsightedness come back to haunt humanity. People, who relied upon their politicians to be wise, instead find themselves squarely in the path of danger due to "politics-as-usual." The Posleen are no longer complete cyphers, and show that they *can* learn. This isn't at all good for humanity, and the entire book revolves around what happens when one brilliant and innovative Posleen commander intersects with the defects of human foresight.

There is a widening of scope that moves the focus somewhat away from the principle characters of the first two books, and sharpens the focus on some previous bit-players. New characters are introduced, and hints of schemes within schemes begin to surface. It seems that humanity isn't without allies against the treachery of the Darhel, even though the Darhel appear to be playing a deeper game than has before been shown.

This is a more fully realized story than A Hymn Before Battle, and probably better than Gust Front. Ringo is maturing, and despite some quibbles, shows every sign of being David Drake's equal. If you like stories about good heroes, really 'bad' bad guys, and realistically rendered blood-n-thunder, pick this up and give it a read!

I did feel a bit cheated that we the reader in effect missed the war. I mean here we are chugging along in Hymn Before Battle getting ready for a knockdown dragout fight and when we open "Dance With the Devil" the war against the insane have to kill all the human super-horses has already been going on for some time. I loved the book but this is what costs it the 5th star. I would have liked to have seen humanity getting the stuffing knocked out of it.

The series looks like it is going to continue and if that is the case I will continue reading it