Customer Reviews

Hell's Faire (Posleen War Series #4)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Hi, it's John.

I understand some of the reviews (I'm ignoring the ones that boil down to "I don't like John Ringo Books") and some of the reasons that reviewers were dissatified. But others I'm not quite grokking, especially comments about the "rushed ending." For general information, the book ended almost exactly as I had intended when I wrote Hymn Before Battle. (I always think of series as "meta-stories" and have the ending for the last book generally worked out in advance.) I, personally, loved the ending, as a writer and a reader. So I feel a necessity to understand your concerns.

I'll mea culpa on the fact that I had to split the books. I explain why in Hell's Faire. If you don't like the explanation, sorry. It's the honest truth.

Oh, one comment on one of the most atrocious reviews. Glennis LeBlanc, as described, physically and personality, is a friend of mine, a book-seller based in the South East. The scene that is so "controversial" was based upon three or four real life incidents and the honest progress of the story. I, myself, made the same (mental) mistake that Kilzer did (physically) and had to go back and rework my calculations, only realizing afterwards that... well I made the same mistake. From there the scene proceeded naturally. It was not "set-up", it was truly classic writing.

And Glennis thought it was hilarious.

If anyone wants to personally comment, discuss or debate, my e-mail is available at Baen's Bar (www.baen.com) or on my website. (Amazon tends to strip them.) Feel free to contact me and ask any questions you would like including about the future of the series.

Thanks,

John Ringo

PS: Amazon requires a rating. I gave it four stars because I probably would as a reader. Go figure.

Hell's Faire (2003) is the fourth novel in the Legacy of the Aldenata series, following When the Devil Dances. In the previous volume, the Posleen have begun their main assault, overcoming all fixed defenses everywhere in the world except the eastern United States and Canada. Their drive to Asheville through Rabun Gap has been stopped temporarily by a nuclear bombardment. There is a short lull in the fighting as both sides reorganize and refit.

In this novel, Mike O'Neal and his 555th Mobile Infantry are inserted into Rabun Gap to prepare for the upcoming Posleen assault. However, Tulo'stenaloor, senior Posleen commander in the forces attacking the Gap, has learned a little about the human method of warfare and sets up an ambush for the 555th.

Mike's daughter, Callie O'Neal, is alone in Cache 4 on the O'Neal farm. Mike's father had been caught on the surface during the nuke blasts and, when Callie found him, his body was cold and buried under the debris. Now Callie prepares to leave the farm, but just then the defense forces drop a salvo of strategic nukes on three passes near Mountain City. Since things are a little hectic outside, she decides to wait a while before venturing out.

Sergeant Major Mosovich and the refugees are only a few miles from Cache 4, but are cut off from the defending forces. Moreover, his AID advises them that the nukes are incoming. They have been running the ridgelines, but these are too exposed with nuclear blasts on the way. Jake leads his party back to Cache 4.

Meanwhile, the maintenance brigade for Sheva Nine -- Bun-Bun -- has finally caught up to the monster weapon. They bring with them Paul Kilzer, one of the designers of the Sheva gun platform. He has a few ideas for enhancing the weapon. Moreover, he looks like Riff in the Sluggy Freelance cartoons.

BTW, some reviewers have referred to Bun-Bun as a supertank. On the contrary, the Sheva Nine is a lightly armored self-propelled gun, with very poor mobility. The weather shield is not an armored turret, but rather a relatively thin screen to keep out rain and small-arms fire. Notice that the heavier Posleen weapons have little trouble penetrating the weather shield or even the hull itself. The Shevas were originally designed to kill Posleen landers and C-decs, which they do quite handily. Anti-personnel actions became possible only with the addition of the MetalStorm turrets. Even then, Bun-Bun would not have survived close contact with the Posleen without her escorts (and the oversized Claymores).

Back on the campus, Dr. Miguel Castanuelo, a graduate of Georgia Tech who is now a professor at arch-rival UT at Knoxville, is an expert on micro-containment of anti-matter. He has been trying to devise a way to use anti-matter as a fuel for cars, trucks and other small vehicles. After studying the Indowy methods of containment, he concludes that it is a religious thing and returns to his previous notions. He manages to develop a process of encapsulation in bucky balls, but the results are rather radioactive for several days afterwards. Of course, this isn't a problem with an area denial weapon, so he produces a big orange surprise for the Posleen.

This novel is a continuation of the previous volume. In fact, it would have been incorporated into When the Devil Dances except for the events surrounding 9/11. Although the author is apologetic about the lapse in his writing that caused this portion to be delayed, the final results may have been even better than the originally planned trilogy. This volume contains 330 pages (including the Sluggy Freelance cartoons) and the previous volume contains 494 pages. Even eliminating the backstory verbiage, the combined volume would be larger than some of the Wheel of Time books. My guess is that the paperback would have been split into two volumes anyway.

This volume ends the Legacy of the Aldenata series for now. The author mentions further tales about the backstory and other aspects of the events and characters in this series, but the Posleen invasion is terminated.

Highly recommended for Ringo fans and anyone else who enjoys military science fiction with the ring of authenticity. New readers, however, are strongly encouraged to start with A Hymn Before Battle to get the full effect.

-Arthur W. Jordin

It is very difficult for some of the people here to excuse John Ringo for not including Hell's Faire as part of the earlier book. It's not a stand-alone - instead out of 325 pages of text, it's 315 pages of action, and about 10 pages of explanation.

Apparently these people have never suffered from writer's block themselves. Given the background of John Ringo - it would be very difficult for him to try to write a fictional story of the world falling apart when the real world was falling apart on our TV screens.

The Amazon price is fair for this - I wouldn't pay full price for it, since it's only 325 pages, and it only took me two and a half hours to read. The CD included, though, has another $100 worth of books on it, which is great for Baen to do this.

There will be other books in this series - there are a lot of things to resolve, such as Mike's other daughter, plus what his father and Callie do for the Bane Sidhe. That the Darhel are attempting to bargain again with the Posleen only screams additional series.

If you're a Sluggy fan and found Ringo due the references, hang in there. Read the books from the beginning - and remember, don't let rednecks play with anti-matter!

Having read all of the Posleen war books ("Hymn Before Battle", "Gust Front", "When the Devil Dances", and "Hell's Faire", as well as "Cally's War")I can truthfully say they were all excellent. My biggest problem was that they were not all read in proper sequence so I had difficulty with the connection between them. Going from Hymn to Devil Dances to Callly's and back to Gust before finishing with the Faire is NOT the way to read the series.
By the time I got to "Hell's Faire" I was totally enthralled with the whole series and couldn't put the book down! It took me one whole weekend to read, and I got nothing else accomplished. At that, it was well worth it!
Some repeating ofmany of the explanations got a little cumbersome after the first one or two, but I waded through that pretty quickly to get to the good parts.
Since I was born and raised in Tidewater and Northern Virginia (my Dad was a career Combat Engineer), I can identify with and recognize all the places mentioned even without the map helps. As such the story is much more real to me because it is about real places. Thankfully they are fictional events that happened to those settings.
As for the incident with the mistaken gain control setting on the geiger counter, I did that myself once (I was stationed on a Nike Hercules site in San Francisco) so I know it is an easy mistake to make if you are not very careful. Fortunately I caught the mistake before anyone got their butt in a sling so all I got was a lot of ribbing for being a newbie.
I plan on waiting a few months and then re-reading all of the books of this series IN ORDER so I can get the proper perspective and full flavor. And I highly recommend anyone else to do the same!

It pains me to write this review. After the fantastic energy, detail, cleverness and wit of the first three books, I was eagerly expecting a smashing finale. I have bought copies of the first books for friends and widely promoted the saga as a great work of modern science fiction. To my horror, I opened the box from Amazon and found a thin hardback, barely an inch thick. The previous volumes, you may recall, were weighty tomes of up to seven hundred pages: Hymn = 480 pp., Gust = 721 pp., Devil = 704 pp. Hell's Faire appears to weigh in at about half the length of Gust or Devil but when all is said and done the book was even shorter than it appeared. Many pages were taken by drawings, afterword and other miscellanea. If you're interested, there are about eight pages of Bun-Bun cartoons and some five to seven pages of maps of areas where events take place in the storyline plus the author's afterword in which he indicates the reason why he failed to include this with Devil: 9/11. He also basically admits that he's burned out, which is a real shame. I have great sympathy for Mr. Ringo and wish him all the best, but nobody expects an artist to smear paint across several pieces of their work because they're tired, do they?

The publisher seems to be aware of the paucity of words in the book, so they have included a CD with the full audio text plus a lot of other goodies, none of which interested me nearly as much as a good story. I paid the purchase price for the story before ever knowing that there was a CD, after all. My bad.

The length of the book troubled me not simply because I like large books. No, this was a very complex storyline with many important characters, therefore I expected the volume would be large enough to address all of the characters and the major storylines. Unfortunately, the characters did nothing unexpected and basically just took curtain calls. Several serious problems confronting the characters were solved by deus ex machina rather than any particular efforts on their part. Some characters (i.e. Cally's sister - remember she had a sister "studying abroad"?) are completely missed, while entire plotlines (e.g. everything about the church and the interplay of the factions) is marginalized and wholly undeveloped and unresolved. There is no advancement of any elements of character interaction. There are some lighter moments which are essentially M*A*S*H -like in their banality and which are incongruous with the theme of the series. The whole volume felt like it was thrown together just to get people off of Mr. Ringo's back. I cannot express how disappointed I am by this weak ending to what had been a tremendously compelling story. Surely Mr. Ringo could have taken a bit more time, finished the polish of his characters and gone out a winner. Instead, he polishes off his characters and relegates them to the dustbin. The author's explanation for this is that he intended Hell's Faire to be the conclusion of the third book and that it was never intended to be an independent fourth volume to a trilogy. There was much to write of and much to complete, however. The parts which were completed were done in a slap-dash manner and many were simply unaddressed and forgotten or ignored. The author has sorely disappointed this fan. Could there be a recovery? Possibly. But I will certainly not pre-order another work from Mr. Ringo. I'll wait to skim it at the store.

I'm probably neither the first nor the last Sluggy fan to read John Ringo because of his inclusion of Sluggy elements into his book (and thus free advertising on the site). That said, I must thank Ringo for an excellent trilogy. A Hymn Before Battle, Gust Front, and When the Devil Dances were an amazing series, and got me into Military SF (my first was Hymn).

However, as the author explains in the afterword, the series really was intended as a trilogy, and was - until September 11th. After that, he eventually had to send an incomplete third book to press -- and later, a year later, completed it. This is that completed book.

It suffers from two things. First, it is simply too short to be worth buying in Hardcover. Second, he had to add too much filler into it, either in the form of "This is what happened before", or in the form of slightly longer scenes and/or more in-between stuff, to make the book long enough to justify publishing -- meaning, that it is not very satisfying. Certainly worth reading, Ringo is a good enough author that I'd read his notes from ninth grade science class (Literally -- ever go back and read YOUR notes? =); certainly a good idea if you've read the rest of the series, as it does tie up a few loose ends. I just wish he had either decided to make it a genuine fourth book (and played around with his plots to add more potential scenes), or e-published a few thousand words on ... with "Print this and add it to the end of WTDD" at the top.

The five stars are really for the full series rather than for Hell's Faire. This book is a conclusion -- it doesn't make much sense if the reader is not aware of the material already set up in A Hymn Before Battle, Gust Front, and When the Devil Dances. This is particularly the case in regard to the nature of the various aliens and the role of the various resistance groups.

That much having been said, it furnishes a satisfactory stopping point. This is just as well, since the author states in the afterword that this universe will not be be reappearing for some time.

A sufficient number of unanswered questions remain to make the reader wish that it would reappear.

I believe John Ringo had originally intended this to be part of the previous book, and it shows. I'm unclear on why it was decided to split the story, but I'd have much preferred him to not do so. The review of this book is very similar to the previous one, "When the Devil Dances." The humans are still mostly two-dimensional, GalTech is still magic, and Bun-Bun the murderous mini-lop rabbit of Sluggy Freelance still plays way too large a role. Never the less, this is still a good read, albeit the weakest of the series.

My complaints from previous books in this series remain, with some new ones: Entirely too much focus is placed on what seems to be intended as 'humorous' or humanizing elements, like the continual and annoying "Let's Rock, Posleen-boy" Sluggy references. Once is enough. Twice is plenty. Three times is too many. OK, John, we get it: You *really* like Sluggy. It's nothing new, and it doesn't need you to wave it about with the fervor of a new religious convert. Sluggy was here before you knew about it, and it'll be here long after this book has begun to fade from prominence. Lay off already.

Due to the splitting, story feels truncated, and I felt cheated when it was over so quickly. The ultimate deux ex machina rescue happens, and I was left flat at the end of the story, wondering, "That's it?" I get the impression that Ringo just got tired of the whole thing, and wrapped it up in a hurry. Too bad, because he was *finally* working up a nice tension in a climatic confrontation between the battered 555th Mobile Infantry and the last gasp-assault of the Posleen.

To the good, many of the stronger points of the previous books are retained. The scope of the story narrows again, somewhat, and sharpens focus on a slightly different collection of principle characters. No new characters are introduced, but some existing ones are fleshed out a bit. The Darhel schemes are left to go hang. Many story threads are left unresolved. This book has "Follow-on stories" written all over if, and I'm ready and waiting to read what comes next. Despite a weak ending, the series was very good, and I'm looking for more.

If it wasn't coming after two much stronger books, I might still recommend this, if only lightly. As it is, this book is still a must-read, if only to bring a conclusion to the 'invasion of earth' story arc.

Just finished Hell's Faire... must admit to being a bit dissappointed... the writing is fun... favorite characters from previous installments are all there... but the story just felt cobbled together... the first three books were always gripping... this one was dangerously close to fluff, with the end coming and going so quickly that I ended up staring at the last page for a bit, wondering if I had missed something... all in all I would recommend this series... great stuff... it just just ends on a bit of a down note...

First let me say that perhaps the most enlightening portion is the author's comments at the end of the book. The odd cliffhanger ending of the previous book is explained. These four books were originally planned as a trilogy with a longer story arc to follow. Eventhough more from Aldenata is to come the wait will be longer that avid fans will like.
My dissappointment may be based on very high expectations but I still highly recommend the entire series including this book. For those familiar with the series, it is more "Bun-Bun" than Michael O'Neal and the rest of the large cast.
The inclusion of the free CD should not be overlooked since it includes the previous 3 books on it in addition to many other extras. See the publisher's website for more details.