Title The Apocalypse Troll Series --- Author David Weber Cover Art --- Publisher Baen - 2001 First Printing Baen - 2001 Category Military Science Fiction Warnings None Main Characters Richard Ashton, Colonel Ludmilla Leonova Main Elements Aliens, Time Travel Website ---

There he was in his sailboat in the middle of the Atlantic, all alone and loving it. Well, there was a US Navy carrier group on his southern horizon, but he was US Navy himself, so he didn't mind. Then came the UFOs, hurtling in from the Outer Black to overfly the carriers at Mach 17. Their impossible aeronautics were bad enough - but then they started shooting at each other. And at the Navy. With nukes. Little ones at first, but winding up with a 500 megatonner at 90 miles that fried every piece of electronics within sight. Richard Ashton thought he was just a ringside observer to these now over-the-horizon events. Until the crippled alien lifeboat came drifting down and homed in on his sailboat; suddenly he had his hands full of an unconscious, critially wounded alien warrior - who just happened to be a gorgeous female, too. And that was when it began to get really interesting...

I got this book for free from the Baen Free Library. This book took me a really long time to get through. I mean it started off very exciting, a chase through space of a group of humans hunting down some enemy aliens, shifting dimensions to go faster and faster to the point where they should, in theory, be able to travel back in time. It was clear the aliens were trying to eliminate their enemies at the source!

Then they do indeed end up on Earth...I couldn't figure out when. It by some dates mentioned that it would be a couple hundred years in the future but the Earth tech seemed to be what one would expect in 2001 so I was very confused most of the time. Decided to ignore that bit and just assume it was happening today.

So a guy on a boat finds one of the humans from the future and as they float to land we get some info dumps of how we came to be mixed up in this war. And also that one of the aliens survived and just the one alien and his ship alone would be enough to pretty well destroy Earth so they'll need to tackle the near impossible task of taking him out. Oh by the way he's telepathic so only humans with certain brainwaves should be told about his existence otherwise he'll know we know and make his move sooner, instead of just finding some extremist religious dude and trying to manipulate events through him instead of acting directly (even though there shouldn't be any Earth weapons that could hurt him). After bringing a whole bunch of characters up to speed (which means repeatedly doing about the same actions with different people over and over again for about a third of the book) we can finally get around to tackling the bad guy. Oh, and did I say that the human from the future has some parasite in her blood that allows her to live essentially forever and that she's also essentially contagious? Adding an unnecessary twist to this tale (in fact I found the same twist in Robinson's Red Mars as a feeble excuse to keep his main characters alive long enough to terraform Mars rather than a key ingredient to his tale, it was so unrealistic).

Now you'd think this would get exciting again, and perhaps for some readers it does. But it's basically non-stop military technical terms and acronyms for fancy weapons and vehicles, sometimes with the same letters just in different orders. If you are really into weaponry you'd probably find this part cool, but since I couldn't keep track of what everything was, and didn't care too, I just tried to skim this as fast as I could to find out how things wrap up in the end.

And finally, he made to me what is always a fatal mistake. He went into the head of a truly evil creature. I find that always comes off cheezy, where the character does nothing but think about how much pleasure he'll get from torturing people and stealing candy from children. It's always two-dimensional and eye-rolling. If your villain has no redeeming features, no one really wants to know what is going on his head, in fact he's nothing more than a foil for your protagonist, so just leave it at that, we don't need additional insight. He's evil, we got it, don't need to see him get a figurative hard on while sucking the thoughts out of some innocent person's head and then being disappointed when the person dies too fast.

So on the whole, the first quarter to a third held my interest, the rest I needed to kind of force my way through to the end. And this has been a familiar feeling with the free Baen books. I don't blame the authors for putting up their lesser works for free, I can understand that, they don't sell anyway so might as well just give them away, but on the other hand it risks turning people off an otherwise good author (I assume Weber must be decent as he's prolific and popular). Not all the Baen books are like that, I did enjoy some, but this one was a "Meh" kind of book for me. But then I'm more fantasy than SF, if he had info dumped magic instead of military jargon I might have lapped it up.