Customer Reviews

A Hymn Before Battle (Legacy of the Aldenata Series)

5 star:		(60)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(12)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

It's books like this that make me a loyal Baen Books reader.

John Ringo has crafted a universe in which some aliens, themselves incapable of violence or, apparently, military strategy, have decided to use humans as literal "army ants" to destroy some other aliens who have been taking their worlds away from them one by one. And, of course, once the job is done and we're no longer needed...

Of course humanity has long had a history of wriggling out of binds and generally playing merry hell with expectations made of it, and in this book, we are no different. I won't spoil the fun, but it's interesting seeing Ringo deal simultaneously with High Strategy and Low Tactics at the same time, while giving us characters we can care about and follow around as they attempt to keep humanity alive.

This is the first book in what promises to be a series well worth following. The ending ties up the current set of loose ends very neatly, but I'm already salivating in anticipation of the sequel, which will be out in April, 2001, and I've already bought my "webscription" copy.

Read it and enjoy. Me, I'm going out to get a copy as a gift for my brother, and watch the smile on his face.

I have been reading this in pieces since it was available online at Baen. Take a little Heinlein, a little Clancy, mix in the imagination of this great new author and you have one of the best new SF books to come along in years. A stunningly realistic book that shows what would happen if today's soldiers wer forced to fight tomorrows war. Ringo accurately portrays the United States military, especially the Airborne warriors and writes a story that is amazingly real.

Read this book and then read it again so you catch all of the action. I sincerely hope that there is more to come from John Ringo.

In the very near future, humanity receives good news and bad news. The good news is that Earth has finally been contacted by a superior alien society - and they're friendly. The bad news is, the friendlies are on the losing end of an interstellar war with an implacable enemy - and Earth is directly in the line of fire!

How would mankind adjust to the double shock of knowing that "we are not alone" and the fact that the Earth will soon be ground zero in a seemingly hopeless battle? More specifically, how would the military men and women on the front lines deal with such daunting responsibility? This is the premise of freshman author John Ringo's novel A Hymn before Battle - the first in a proposed trilogy to be published by Baen Books.

Ringo, an Army veteran and admitted fan of such suspense writers as W.E.B. Griffin and Tom Clancy, plunges us into the world of the grunts - the men and women of our armed forces who do all the dirty work, and who must live (or die) with the consequences of incompetent command. This book is tech-heavy and combat-detailed - fellow veterans and fans of the military SF which is Baen's stock-in-trade should love this book. Foul-mouthed, tough and quirky, Ringo's good guys are forced to deal with alien technologies they'd never dreamed of, face foes that make previous human adversaries look like prom dates, and work around short-sighted bureaucrats pursuing personal agendas. In the background, Earth's new allies (a motley collection of intelligent species) are enigmatic and conniving - and it remains to be seen if humanity can trust them in the long run!

Despite a few warts, A Hymn before Battle is a fine first effort and John Ringo a good fit with Baen's stable of writers. With additional experience (and under the tutelage of accomplished SF author David Weber, with whom he is currently writing another trilogy), John Ringo will very likely rise to the top of his game.

I bought this book based on the fact that author David Weber decided to co-write other books with John Ringo. I loved this novel and was amused by his putting David Weber into the book as a interstellar battle consultant to the military in the first few chapters. The characters were wonderful and you hated to see anyone die. I can't wait to read the next book, and I just saw that book 3 will be released in 2nd quarter 2002, so I won't have to wait too long to continue the series. His thoughts into what warriors must go through and what their last thoughts might be seems authentic. Yet there is an underlying humor that never lets it get too grim to enjoy. The characters are all real and have real feelings. Must have military Sci-fi.....Buy it!

There's a new name on my "must buy" list, John Ringo. Not many authors make it, and only two write military fiction -- Clancy and Bujold. As for the rest, Ringo just left them in his dust!

You want a gripping storyline? It's here. You like characters so real, you could be standing in their skins? You got 'em. You're looking for sheer storytelling power that grabs your mind and heart and will not let you go? Be prepared to sign up for the duration.

Learn a new definition of "long-range patrol." Know the frustration of dealing with higher-ups who care more about scoring points with the brass than about fighting the battles... or keeping their troops alive. Live the fear and confusion of broken comms, fractured chains of command, desperately depleted supplies, and an unstoppable enemy coming straight down your throat. Look out over shattered rubble that used to be a city and wonder if your hometown will be next. Knowing it will be.

This is life and death, glory and shame. This is combat as I've seldom seen it portrayed, with the human spirit stripped down to the bare essentials where it, alone, can say whether to go on or lay down and die.

Ringo said he wrote this for soldiers. As a veteran, myself, I say, "Thank you, John. You did us proud."

So move over, Clancy. Edge over a bit, Bujold. John Ringo deserves to share that spotlight. I can hardly wait for the next installment from this incredibly talented storyteller.

Perhaps the most difficult obstacle that a Military Fiction book must face is the sense of realism. This is a still more daunting task when you are presenting a military story in a Science Fiction milieu. For a first time writer this is often an impossible task. Many of the well-known authors in Military Fiction are technically competent, but often it is in their later novels that they finally show character development. In Military Science Fiction the list of authors who are technically competent as well as who posses the ability to create characters that one cares for is vanishing small.

This is not the case with John Ringo and "A Hymn Before Battle". The fact that the reader immediately feels the protagonist is "real", carries this book over the initial first time writer jitters. Lt. Michael O'Neal comes to life in this book. By the time you finish you will be able to tell a police sketch artist how to draw him.

Furthermore, the reader will also be able to feel that they care about Mike O'Neal's wife and children, the members of his scratch platoon, and even a Medevac pilot who makes a brief appearance.

To this Ringo adds military reality. Despite the super suits that the soldiers wear, lack of sleep becomes an enemy as well. As anyone who has served in a combat arm will attest, this is a very real threat. Extended combat operations take their toll on soldiers both physically and mentally. In real life and in this book.

That is the key to this book. All of the action that one expects, plus the added personal touches that makes a book both realistic and memorable. Those who think that Military Science Fiction novels are merely exploding spaceships; would be well advised to read this book. It develops into a real page-turner that leaves you ready for more of Lt. Michael L O'Neal.

Kalilover

Before anyone guts me with a spear, let me say I enjoyed reading this book. The pacing is good, and the characters that are well developed are likeable. That said, there is much to be desired, and the more I think about this book after finishing it, the less satisfied I am.

First, whoever edited this book ought to be dragged out into the street and shot, or at least forced to read the collected works of William Zinsser and "Elements of Editing" until they have some sense of what their job entails. There are too many plot holes, and too many continuity gaps (for example, in one scene a person is perched in a tree with a rifle. Shortly thereafter, a fellow soldier is recovering the soldier's weapons from "her remains," though the author never tells us she was shot, skewered, etc.).

Second, the plot lines all scream "sequel" and, indeed, several books have followed. As Ringo's friend David Weber amply illustrates, even if you are writing a "pilot" there's no need to throw a lot of characters at the reader and then ignore them. The confusing morass of characters in the beginning makes it a lot harder to figure out who's doing what later on. Even some of the plot lines that are developed in the story-such as a special forces excursion to capture one of the invading Posleen-seem thrown in almost as an afterthought.

Finally, Ringo's plot borrows so much from Heinlein's classic "Starship Troopers" that it can't help but suffer by comparison. Where Heinlein's Rico is a believable everyman, Ringo's Mike O'Neal is Indiana Jones and the Incredible Hulk rolled into one.

Make no mistake-Ringo is a promising writer, and fans of "hard" sci-fi will enjoy this book even while they wince at some of the details. But it would be refreshing to see better editing and a bit more originality with the plot lines. As I've stated before, much of today's sci fi is pure dreck; this book rises above the morass enough to be notable, but not as far or as well as it could have, and (with a firmer hand at Baen) should have.

The good part of this book is Ringo's feel for the military. It's quite clear, once you get past the dull and boring beginning, that he's been there, and knows what he's talking about. The bad part is that the writing itself lacks sparkle. Maybe as Ringo continues on-- this is his first novel-- he will improve, but for this first try the prose is servicable, but clumsy. Overall conclusion: if you like military sf, you'll like this one; if you're looking for literary, fergittaboutit.

The book was a fun fast read, however, the internal inconsistancies distracted me too much from the story.

How can the soldier/engineers with clearly inadequate training, on an alien world, in the middle of a battle, jury-rig power for the ACS (combat suits) in a hour or so?

How can complete chaos reign on an army base in the US because of a lack of officers during a massive recall of troops? Com'on...

I can suspend quite abit of belief reading sci-fi, but having to pause my brain as often as I was required to made this just an OK read.

A Hymn Before Battle

AHBB was a great first attempt t going solo for John Ringo. He has injected new life into the SF arena by supplying the public with this deep and intriguing read. Lately, SF books have tended to lean towards the more bland side of things-shallow characters, paper-thin plots, and somewhat over-imaginative weaponry and battle tactics that if employed in the real world would be catastrophic...for the employers of said tactics. However, Ringo delivers a novel with characters that you actually begin to look forward to hearing about again later in the novel, realistic tactics and weapons (for the humans anyway...the aliens are another story but somehow still rather believable approach), and a plot that simply cannot be denied.

It is the near future, and Earth is in its golden age. Global peace has been (for the most part) attained at last, crime is down along with unemployment and America is at a point not reached since the end of the Great Depression. However, seemingly friendly aliens, the "Galactics", or members of a benign federation of planets, have arrived with a dire warning. This warning is of a race called the Posleen, a species of crocodilian-headed centaurs. The devour (literally) everything in their path, including their own dead and the dead of the other side. And, of course, planet Earth is next on their list. However, they also came with a deal that as Ringo puts it, "we couldn't refuse." The deal is that the Galactics will supply us with weapons and armor and also help us to rejuvenate old combat veterans to help fight again in the coming battles, but in exchange we must also use these resources to defend three planets: two, Barwhon and Diess, belong to the Galactics...and the third is a little closer to home...in fact, it is home-planet Earth.

To give a brief example of the detail that Ringo employs in his novel, here is a short scene from a battle on the planet Diess...
"...In two seconds a thousand of these supremely destructive "teardrops" punched through fifty drums of fish oil. One pellet was enough to finely distribute a drum of oil over two to three thousand cubic meters of air. The following rounds found only vapor, and these excess pellets, following the immutable laws of physics, set off to find other barrels to divide. The oil from thousands of drums suddenly flash blasted into gas then ignited from compression, rather like a diesel piston. The net effect was a fuel-air bomb, the next best thing to a nuclear weapon in Terran technology, and the basement warehouse became a gigantic diesel cylinder. For Sergeant Reese, in an instant the world flashed to fire..."
Ringo veers into this type of dramatic detail quite often, but always manages to draw it into the story with unbelievable relevance. This is one of the main reasons that this book and its followers quickly became among my all time favorite books. Kudos to John Ringo for devising and writing such an engrossing and delightful novel that left me wishing for my own Armored Combat Suit.