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Annoying: the guy in my field who really rubs me the wrong way responded to a mailing list question about implementing practice X by saying that, because he tries to be a nice guy, he does not-X. Yeah, you’re super nice, as that response clearly demonstrates. (Must enhance my calm. Delete button, how you have saved me.)
Eric Flint & K.D. Wentworth, The Course of Empire: Twenty years ago, the Jao conquered the Earth. Humans are the fightin’est species the Jao ever encountered, making this conquest the most difficult of any the Jao had pulled off before. Americans were the fightin’est and held out the longest, thus suffering the most in the way of physical destruction, a fact that pleases some other nations (most especially Japan). Even so, the Jao occupation is headquartered in the US, with the puppet president’s daughter Caitlin a hostage raised very close to the Jao governor, so close that she’s learned a lot about how they think and speak; Jao think about honor and duty differently than humans (though again they’re closest to the Japanese, according to a couple of POV characters). Tully, a resistance fighter, and Caitlin, along with some other plucky humans, get swept up with a new Jao from a different clan than the governor; Jao politics might just change the oppression under which humans are suffering. But the Jao are on Earth for a reason: they need resources to fight the Ekhat, who want to destroy all non-Ekhat life in the universe. And the Ekhat are coming.
Okay, so this is roughly 75% Red Dawn with space invaders. And, while Flint and Wentworth go to great lengths to explain some of the plot girders (the Jao’s ignorance of/contempt for projectile weapons as opposed to lasers; why the genocidal Ekhat might bother to fight a ground war rather than obliterating whole planets at one blow; the Jao’s lack of imagination compared to humans), there’s still a palpable sense that the scenario works the way it does because the authors carefully tweaked the rules to produce the maximum fun/cheerleading for human ingenuity. On the other hand, the book does what it does reasonably well, and it actually tries to deal with the question of what happens when the conquerors cannot be kicked out on their butts. As long as you can swallow the American = human stuff, it’s a little like reading David Brin with the human inferiority substantially sucked out and some swashbuckling put in.
Eric Flint & K.D. Wentworth, The Course of Empire: Twenty years ago, the Jao conquered the Earth. Humans are the fightin’est species the Jao ever encountered, making this conquest the most difficult of any the Jao had pulled off before. Americans were the fightin’est and held out the longest, thus suffering the most in the way of physical destruction, a fact that pleases some other nations (most especially Japan). Even so, the Jao occupation is headquartered in the US, with the puppet president’s daughter Caitlin a hostage raised very close to the Jao governor, so close that she’s learned a lot about how they think and speak; Jao think about honor and duty differently than humans (though again they’re closest to the Japanese, according to a couple of POV characters). Tully, a resistance fighter, and Caitlin, along with some other plucky humans, get swept up with a new Jao from a different clan than the governor; Jao politics might just change the oppression under which humans are suffering. But the Jao are on Earth for a reason: they need resources to fight the Ekhat, who want to destroy all non-Ekhat life in the universe. And the Ekhat are coming.
Okay, so this is roughly 75% Red Dawn with space invaders. And, while Flint and Wentworth go to great lengths to explain some of the plot girders (the Jao’s ignorance of/contempt for projectile weapons as opposed to lasers; why the genocidal Ekhat might bother to fight a ground war rather than obliterating whole planets at one blow; the Jao’s lack of imagination compared to humans), there’s still a palpable sense that the scenario works the way it does because the authors carefully tweaked the rules to produce the maximum fun/cheerleading for human ingenuity. On the other hand, the book does what it does reasonably well, and it actually tries to deal with the question of what happens when the conquerors cannot be kicked out on their butts. As long as you can swallow the American = human stuff, it’s a little like reading David Brin with the human inferiority substantially sucked out and some swashbuckling put in.
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