Customer Reviews

Cold Allies

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Well, there are many things wrong with this book. The major one is that the characterizations are totally unbelievable. Very lttle of the motivations are explained, and the random way that the male characters all start shedding tears was rather strange. Not to mention the "S" in SF is rather weak too. I can't believe I actually spent money on this piece of trash.

What I like most about Anthony's futuristic (ie. take place at some time in the future) novels is how natural they play. Cold Allies, Cradle Of Splendour and Conscience of the Beagle have a view of the future that is very convincing and this makes the backdrop of each of the stories more interesting and palatable. This in contrast to say.... Dan Simmon's Hyperion where people owned houses that had each room in a different galaxy all joined together by some cosmic work hole. Yeah... interesting.... but the operative word in SF would be Fiction.

In Cold Allies, climatic change has lead to North Africa and the Middle East to completely dry up and all the Islamic countries have banded together and invaded Europe so as to avoid starving to death. The United States is a willing if slightly ineffecvtive ally to the Europeans, having had its economy and population devastated by the same climatic changes which have also put much of the USA under water.

The story revolves around the involvement (or lack of) in this war of a mysterious alien presence. The presence manifests itself as a blue globe and it invariably shows up at the sites of major battles in the European theatre.

The blue globe seems to have a strange attraction to a remotely controlled battle robot (think Mech-Warrior) whose satellite connected controller is so psychically connected to the robot that his persona appears to be felt by the globe through the inanimate workings of the machine.

The story line is part future history, part war drama and part alien mystery. The future history is interesting, the war drama is compelling with rich, complex characters, and the alien mystery is ultimately, well.... mysterious. Chris Carter, producer of the XFiles once said that what made episodes of that show frightening was that they never showed too much detail of the "monster". It was always shrouded in darkness. Anthony treats her aliens in a similar way, never anthropomorphizing them. This is achieved perfectly in her book God's Fires and it possibly a little overdone in Cold Allies, but I enjoyed it a lot none the less.

It's sometime in the 21st century, and humanity is in trouble. Runaway greenhouse effect has ravaged the world, sending starving Arab armies into the heart of Europe while the United States faces chaos as the breadbasket dries up and blows away. Against this background appear the Blue Woofers: mysterious lights that may or may not be alien visitors. They're thoroughly inscrutable, but they do seem to be interested in observing human beings under conditions of extreme stress... This is a very solid first novel, with alien aliens, well-crafted battle scenes, and taut psychological suspense. I do have some quibbles (some of the subplots are really extraneous) but overall this is well worth a look

It's sometime in the 21st century, and humanity is in trouble. Runaway greenhouse effect has ravaged the world, sending starving Arab armies into the heart of Europe while the United States faces chaos as the breadbasket dries up and blows away. Against this background appear the Blue Woofers... mysterious lights that may or may not be alien visitors. They're thoroughly inscrutable, but they do seem to be interested in observing human beings under conditions of extreme stress... This is a very solid first novel, with alien aliens, well-crafted battle scenes, and taut psychological suspense. I do have some quibbles (some of the subplots are really extraneous) but overall this is well worth a look

An intriguing look into people and what makes us tick

This author is definitely basing this more on truth than fiction. Writing it as fiction allows one to not have to defend what is.

If you are looking for a story about strange happenings on the battlefied and a critique on war and our culture, this is a good place to start. If you want cogent military drama, probable future projections or realistic politics, then walk on by. It's the future and (naturally) the world is in ruins by man's wicked ways. The Arabs have invaded Europe because - as one officer put it, "They are hungry." Yeah, right. Not to conquer the infidel or force Islam but for a nice plate of pasta.

Let's get the bad parts out of the way. Weaponary is dated - apparently in the future missles and airplanes are banned. All actions seems to be on the ground. The invasion of Eastern Europe is susiciously similar to the earlier invasion by the Turks under Saladin. A virtual fighting machine is introduced but it is vague, more description than real. Secondly, politics are wacko - Libyans, Moroccans, Egyptians and Algerians who have been bickering for centuries suddenly unite. And while Europe will probably be Muslim within a century it will be due to the loss of will, not an invasion.

Good parts: The ephemeral nature of the aliens, the "Virtual" world in which the captured humans lived, the way the personal problems were introduced, the ending.