SHIVA OPTION (Mass Market Paperback)

I read the earlier book, IN DEATH GROUND, which begins the story told in THE SHIVA OPTION.

One aspect of IN DEATH GROUND that kept me on the edge of my seat was the defeat of mankind and his allies. From the first collision with the bugs, the war began to go badly for man -- and it went more and more wrong.

At the end of IN DEATH GROUND man and his allies were fighting a desperate last-ditch battle at Alpha Centauri, which in this story was the web link directly to Sol -- and Earth. This battle was only won by a hair-- and by some extraordinary good luck. In other words, mankind was hanging on by their fingernails, and the bugs were prying those fingers loose! When IN DEATH GROUND ended, mankind was in imminent peril of going down to annihilation.

The continuation of the story in THE SHIVA OPTION has an opposite character. Men and their allies begin winning early in the book, and the victories are big. In every battle, while there are losses on both sides, Terra wipes out ten bugs for each human (or allied) death. As men and their allies rack up a chain of major victories, the book actually gets less and less interesting. By the midpoint of this book, the ending seems a foregone conclusion. Man is sure to win "by a knockout." As we plow through the final half of this very large book, we wonder if we really need to "observe" each and every individual bug planet go down to destruction.

One very interesting new element that adds to THE SHIVA OPTION is the reemergence of the bugs' "old enemy." Men are the bugs' new enemy, of course. The old enemy had disappeared by fleeing the bugs centuries before-- a last strategy to avoid racial destruction. Now, suddenly they are back!

It is very bad karma that the bugs should once again collide with their old enemies while in the middle of a war of attrition with mankind. They are already losing-- now they have to divert a major part of their fleets to counter this new threat.

I liked THE SHIVA OPTION a lot. But unfortunately, one-third into the book you realize that the end is a foregone conclusion--that mankind is stretching out a great technological lead and increasingly wiping out fleets of bug ships. So where's the suspense? I still plowed through to the end because the battle descriptions are so well done. Weber (with White, I suppose) has to be one of the very best future war writers out there, along with David Drake and Keith Laumer.

One map has a legend (I think), but the print is so tiny it is unreadable, even under a magnifying glass. (I am referring here to the paperback). Even the names attached to the stellar systems are all but unreadable. There is definitely nothing on either map which is labeled as the "Anderson Chain," which is much referred to in the text. While it is possible to figure out approximately which points on one map are the Anderson Chain, there is still an uncomfortable vagueness.

The reader is often left to wonder how someone got from one specified place to another; the path is often anything but clear.

If the maps were readable and in agreement with the text, I could probably have justified giving it 5 stars; it would be very close to 4 1/2.