Customer Reviews

Face of the Enemy

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

This is an excellent book, especially for a new author. Fawkes tells a great military science fiction story with lots of intrigue, a very interesting and well-realized setting, and a strong sense of mystery and dread as the characters probe into the mysterious aline menace, the Remor. The characters are very good,and Fawkes does a good job of keeping you interested in them even though some of them are extremely unpleasant people. Highly reccomended.

The foreground story is more complicated and interesting than most military sci-fi. The people have believable, individual motivations, and the issues aren't black and white. There seems to be a LOT going on in the background, and not just the peculiar war against the mysterious aliens. I wish Fawkes had done more than just sketch in some of the governments, personalities, other interests that complicate things with their private agendas. Maybe this was deliberate, to whet our appetites for the rest of the trilogy (series)? If so, it worked for me.

The first 150 pages of this novel are overly complex, but don't let that deter you from reading on. The storylines finally do intersect and begin to weave together with varying rates of success. The socio-anthopological complexity that is inherent in both the human and alien cultures is strange and sometimes hard to understand, but the overall concept is fascinating, if disgusting at how mankind can be so "in-human."

There are a number of mysteries generated that are not resolved until the last few pages, and there are several storylines that go unresolved making you wonder if a sequel is pending. The writing is solid, the characters well defined (if somewhat unlikable), and the pace/action moves along briskly. Recommended for those who enjoy reading a bit of military sci-fi mixed with a bit of hardcore and sociological sci-fi.

All of humanity is threatened with extinction by the relentless, indomitable alien Remor. Or is it? The cover of the book suggests so. Many of the characters seem paralyzed by fear of them. However, there seem to be dozens-- perhaps hundreds -- of human inhabited worlds and only a few appearances of the Remor. And even when they do show up, the humans do not do all that bad in the battles. Moreover, it appears that most of humanity is so indifferent to the Remor threat that they are unwilling to sign up with the Interstellar Defense League -- which was created by more threatened systems to combat the Remor threat. Still, I liked this book enough to buy the sequel.

Though the Remor threat is the overarching motivator for most of the characters, much of the story follows a team of scientists as they study a primitive alien race on a newly discovered planet. Are these primitives really the Remor? Long lost cousins perhaps? Or related in some other less threatening way? The scientists allow for some interesting character development and their troubles keep their particular narrative thread interesting. Another narrative thread following a soldier involved in battling the Remor is also worthwhile. Some other lesser narrative threads served their purposes but were allowed to get too much of a life of their own without much closure.

One thing I liked about the book was the tension between the IDL, which takes the Remor threat very seriously, and the more pacifistic planets and human governments, who do not. It's kind of an interstellar Red State/Blue State cultural divide, with terms like "pansies" and "jack booted thugs" being exchanged between the disagreeable human camps. Sometimes the IDL is overly militiristic and sometimes the others do act like oblivious wimps, but since the Remor are real and do appear powerful, which side are you willing to give a few breaks?

The actual battles, in space and on the ground, are interesting as far as they go. But this is not really Space Opera and you do not get the global picture and drama that a David Weber would deliver. The battles seem intended more to develop characters and serve narrative purposes rather than be the ends of the book themselves.

Enjoyable enough to buy the sequel, which I thought was an improved product.

Wow, this book is so badly written I felt the need to take the time to write a review to warn others away from it.

First off, it represents itself as military SF, which is reinforced by the cover art, but the reality is that this is nothing like military space opera at all. The characters are worse than cardboard cutouts; they don't even obey their own rules and do things that don't even make sense within the context of the people they are supposed to be. The author clearly has huge contempt for the military.

Most of the 'action' (use that word sparingly because there is no real action throughout the whole length of the book) centers around a group of supposedly 'smarter than thou' scientists who were generally dumber than rocks. Nobody was particularly likable to begin with, and their own rampant stupidity and the nastiness they treated each other with made them thoroughly unlikable characters.

The hero/protagonist of the novel is a scientist who is so good at studying aliens that he loses his own sense of self and actually becomes one of them. He's done this before and it took him years to be declared 'sane' again. This might have been interesting if the aliens he was studying were anything other than stereotypical 'savages from the jungle' who (of course) are so much more noble, wise and honorable than any human (yet live in dirt huts and eat bugs). Somehow it is vitally important for the scientists to figure out what makes these aliens tick because armed with the information about alien psychology then humanity will magically be able to fight off the Remor who are systematically destroying us.

One word here about how much the author seems to hate the military. The setup is that the Remor (an unknown alien force with high technology) appear suddenly with overwhelming force and destroy planets and systems where humans hold sway. Despite the fact the aliens have superior technology and threaten the very existance of mankind everywhere, only some of the human governments are willing to band together to form a military force to oppose the Remor. This IDL 'Interstellar Defense League' basically does all the fighting and dying to hold off the Remor, and though they are losing ground steadily they are at least buying time for everyone else.

Yet everyone else tends to sneer down their noses at the IDL, referring to them as barbarians and acting as if they themselves are the problem.

Then again, they actually *are* the problem, at least the way the author writes them. Although it makes no logical sense at all, the military of the IDL razes an entire planet of stone-age savage aliens just on the suspicion that they might be distantly related to the Remor aliens that are attacking earth. Then when a second planet is found (again with aliens that basically don't even have writing yet) they want to do the same thing again.

Oh, even trying to make logical sense out of this mess gives me a headache. The author doesn't know how to write - the characters are terrible and the plot is worse. Plus the author has a huge contempt for anything military, and it really shows through, making a dumb plot even dumber.

I was expecting a good space opera with fleet-to-fleet combat against an intelligent alien menace (that's what the back of the book promised anyway). This is anything but. I'd recommend Walter Jon William's 'Dread Empire's Fall' series, Jack Campbell's 'The Lost Fleet' series, or Steven Kent's 'Clone Republic' series to name off a couple of the more recent examples of what this genre actually should be.

I find it hard to believe I finished reading this book. It is one of the worst books I have read.

The author obviously hates the military and believes they are all baby killers. Almost every time someone in the military is referenced the author uses some pejorative adjective to define them.

The author feels that the military is incapable of anything good. The military are presented as kill happy automatons. But even though they are kill-happy, the military are not capable of keeping anyone in a prison cell. The number of prison escapes without any of the prisoners being hurt is another reason I hold this book in contempt. The non-military characters in the book can literally walk out of any prison without anyone noticing for hours.

Avoid this book. It is not worth using as toilet paper.

This is a well written book, complex and well thought out. The
background is deep enough to support a variety of follow-on
stories. It is military SF for the thinking person. The book
is sequel ready but story tidies up nicely at the end.

If you are looking for something stilted and mechanical read
David Drake's latest book the Far Side of the Stars.

This book was interesting but there wasnt enough action in it keep me from putting it down. It ends leaving the reader no closer to the answer of the question it posed at the begining of the book (Who is the Remor and why are they bent on distroying humans?). This means that you have to read the next book in the series. I rather have the writer come up with more interesting plots than a series of books still trying to answer one question.

Wow was this bad! Anti-military, anti-authority, shallow, and unimaginative. The author creates a universe in which a strong military is a necessity, then degrades and trashes every aspect of a military and its people whenever they're mentioned. Every military person in the book is some combination of a despicable power-hungry megalomaniac who joys in killing anything and everything and a mindless drone who has two thoughts- "follow orders" and "what can I kill next".

In this universe, there is a technologically superior race, the Remor, that exterminates Humans wherever it encounters us. Part of Humanity has formed the Interstellar Defense League to fight the Remor. The IDL that Fawkes created is evil, deceptive, and tyrannical at EVERY level and on every page. Every non-violent Human system is good and virtuous and as scared of the IDL at least as much as they are of the Remor.

There was one military person who suddenly turned into not so bad a guy. But his change of heart was unbelievable. Fawkes wrote himself into a corner and needed a convenient plot device.

The love-triangle was eye-rollingly obvious and cliched from the very first page it was introduced to us.

The fact that alien technology totally melts itself and any bodies when damaged is another pathetic plot device, this time to avoid describing anything about them. It also ensures that those bastards in the IDL can't benefit from any captured technology or enemies - they would just use it to subjugate the rest of the Human systems they haven't been able to take over yet.

Good, in that it combines a relatively small amount of sterotypical military action (competently, if not thrillingly handled) with a real SF mystery. Clearly has some bugs, e.g., what drives the xeno-sociologist character to "go native"? what happens to a couple of secondary characters at book's end? characterization can be a little flat (e.g. Stone); and just who is the wacky, mysterious billionaire/guru figure with the bad cryptic lines, other than an awkward device for moving the plot along? Despite some first novel quirks, I'll certainly buy the requisite sequel, if only because Fawkes has tried hard to add a little alieness and to a frequently stale SF sub-genre.