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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An apt title for a fine piece of work.,
By
This review is from: Cold Allies (Hardcover)
This is the second Patricia Anthony novel I've read, the first being "Brother Termite". Both novels delve into the UFO arena, with "Cold Allies" touching a upon abductions and mutilations."Cold Allies" takes place in the not too distant future and shows us a world at war over the Earth's dwindling recources, but fighting it with conventional weaponry (sometimes using technologically advanced weapons, sometimes using World War I mentality). Throughout this conflict, the enigmatic aliens often appear over the battle fields, their purpose unknown. Like the unfathonable cattle mutilations and human abductions that are replete in UFOlogy, along with the "Foo-fighter" lore of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, Anthony uses these phenomena to draw in the reader, and true to the UFO mystery itself, she gives no answers as to why, nor to what purpose the aliens may have in abducting and/or mutilating the human victims. The reader is left wondering (as was intended), are the aliens allies or are they dispassionate creatures putting us under their microscope? "Cold Allies" is a fast read (I found it hard to put down), and like "Brother Termite", is a well thought out character-driven novel. If you think UFO's are all hogwash or have not looked into this phenomenon, then I doubt that this novel is for you. However, if you have more than just a passing interest in UFOlogy, you should really enjoy this novel. Between 1 and 10, "Cold Allies" gets a solid 8.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Catapulted to the forefront of World War III predictions,
By
This review is from: Cold Allies (Hardcover)
For a long time, Tom Clancy's "Red Storm Rising" was considered by and large to be the best mass-market speculative fiction about World War III. Then in 1994, Eric Harry wrote his magnificent "Arc Light," which I went on CNN.com to call the best Cold War novel ever, about accidental war between the U. S. and Russia. What these two authors had in common, though, was not necessarily Russo-phobia. Rather, they were limited to envisioning World War III between the U. S. and another nuclear power capable of destroying the world. It did not occur to them that the U. S. and Europe might fight World War III against a bunch of little countries united by religion, language, and simple, implacable revulsion towards the modern world. It occured instead to Patricia Anthony. And to think that when I first read this book (before the first paperback edition had been printed), I telephoned Ms. Anthony to chide her for making U. S. tanks too easy to kill in her book. Even if the factor unifying the Arabs in her book is food insecurity (as a result of global warming making their already arid homelands more or less uninhabitable), she did come up with what wound up being the most accurate prediction of World War III. And by saying that, of course, I do stick my neck out a ways. All right, I admit that AS OF THIS WRITING, we aren't fighting all the Arab countries. The key words in that statement are capitalized. And I also admit that aliens may never have visited here, or even if they have, may think our predicament so hopeless or our problem-solving abilities so pathetic that they would consider us not worth the effort of saving. Having the good ol' world restored by Mr. Blue for the price of two permanently abducted service members is just a bit intellectually dishonest, and the scene where SACEUR is taken in by a human "psychic" is ludicrous. For her part, Anthony attempts to restore the Victorian consensus that God (wearing the guise of a mysterious alien probe/organism) is clearly interested in human progress. Her thinking about how technology would transform war, however, is visionary even if not capable of being fully realized in a scant eight years. Never fear - the war will last longer than that, though perhaps not quite long enough for everybody's croplands to dry up on their own.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Frustrating,
By B5Anteros (New England) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Cold Allies (Hardcover)
Well, afte reading "God's Fires" and saying in my review that I probably wouldn't be reading her other books... I went ahead and ordered them all anyway. That first book I read was just too good to ignore the rest of the work by this author, even though the ending frustrated me.
The first I finished was "Cold Allies" and it is a fantastic book. The storyline kept me turning the pages until I finished it in one sitting and the ending... though not quite as frustrating as "God's Fires" still left me unsatisfied. It seems that Ms Anthony just can't come up with an ending that makes sense, that brings closure to her stories of Human and Alien intercourse. (Not the sexual kind.) The humans in the story had closure in some sense with everything except the aliens, just like in "God's Fires" and just like "The Happy Policeman" which I also just finished reading. This is so frustrating because this lady can really hold your attention. Her writing is clear and, in places, poetic. I just wish she could close a science fiction book properly. Oh well. I still have "Brother Termite", "Conscience of the Beagle" and "Eating Memories" to read. Let's see how it goes.
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