Customer Reviews

The Shiva Option

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(21)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(13)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

In Death Ground, the prequel to this story, was one of the best space opera shoot'em ups I ever read. Lots of detailed battles with massive tons of spacecraft being demolished in the process...then spending time inside of the survivor's heads. The battles were described in such forensic detail, that I felt like it was the Saving Private Ryan of space opera books in many ways.

Many years later there comes the sequel. Right off the bat, IDG was going to be a hard one to follow up. Does it succeed? Yes and no.

The story reads more like an assessment of the war from the command seat rather than the cockpit. There's lots of detail leading up to every battle(about the ships, the strategies and the characters) but none of the fighting itself really exceeds 2-3 pages as opposed to IDG where battles could last 20-30 pages before cutting away to something else.

This is a long book and for it's length I was surprised by the lack of detail in the space battle scenes that I've really grown to love Weber for. There's some great stuff in this book and some good dialogue, though Weber/White can't resist using a few of hero "one liners" here and there.

Overall I recommend it but don't expect another IDG. In some ways that's good...why bother to write the same book again? But in the same token, they have diluted what was so great about the earlier book a bit too much for my liking.

j

The last book ended leaving you hanging. The Bugs had been stopped, but were still a mysterious and lethal prescence. This book picks up with the delayed Zephrain offensive, and it never stops moving. It's harder core science than a lot of sci fi books, almost the Larry Niven style, though not as grounded in today's physics as Niven is. The war is not going to be easy, and the Alliance knows this, but it begins as did the Russian Campaign after Stalingrad: On the attack. This is a great book. The people are well-defined. The new allies are interesting. The loose ends are tied up.
The battle scenes are always good, and the Bugs have retained their nasty tendency to spring traps. Weber continues his practice of letting you really like a character, who then dies in the war. Moreover, it's not an especially 'heroic' death, it's just...death. Like real life. No final speeches, no gasped last words.
The book has a few weaknesses though. First, the Bugs are pretty much a known quantity. The mystery is stripped away, you discover where all those ships came from, and the Bugs are just faceless bag guys, not the invulnerable force of nature they were when THEY led attacks in IDG.
Second, Weber or White has succumbed to the temptation for Hollywood-style 'coincidences.' The Bugs somehow managing to keep a small world alive is one, but that's not the most unforgiveble. I won't get into that one, but let's jsut say that the whole scene involving ONE GUY in a SPACESUIT after a battle was just too contrived, and ws horribly out of place with David Weber. He takes an almost perverse delight in killing off his main characters on occasion. As such, Star Trek style saves, where only the faceless guys die, stand out way too much. Other than that, though, this was an excellent book!

I'm a little disappointed in that it was not the hard hitting, in your face, extremely fluid reading "In Death Ground" was, I re-read the prequel prior to the sequel and I found the reading of the sequel, a little dull. The two stars is primarily for the character out of the first book whom I never expected to see, her story was well thought out and purposeful, unfortunetly it had gotten lost with everyone else's quest for purpose. Too many questions still linger and too many things were left hanging. Finally, are we to expect yet another novel with the Bugs in the far off future? This book would suggest, yes. Probably not worth the wait for all of us diehards, but I just had to know.

I read many other Weber's books and enjoyed most of them.... However, this book (a sequel to In Death Ground) does not cut it. There is not much of a story, just an unending series of colorful descriptions how the "fighters scream to get vengeance", and undeing tally of the quantities of ships commited and number of KIA and WIA. The tactics are reasonable in some cases, and stupid in others. The humans are either heros or villains/cowards with no middle ground. There is unending repeatition of the advantage of one weapon over the other (how many times do you need an explanation what is a primary pack, and what is it good for?).
The book is BORING!! The only reason I give it 2 stars and not one, is that it continues "In death ground", which also tends to repeat itself similary, and if you loved the first (I did not), you entitled to read the other. However, "In Death Ground" contained some story, and it brought the concept of the bugs, while this one does not.

In my opinion, Mr. Weber wamted to capitalize on the previous book and readers will pay to see a story brought to an ending.
It is not worth it - it's his worst book up to date.

I will not try to write a full-scale review since at this point many good reviews are already listed. I do feel that a few observations may still be helpful.

I read the earlier book, IN DEATH GROUND, which begins the story told in THE SHIVA OPTION.

One aspect of IN DEATH GROUND that kept me on the edge of my seat was the defeat of mankind and his allies. From the first collision with the bugs, the war began to go badly for man -- and it went more and more wrong.

At the end of IN DEATH GROUND man and his allies were fighting a desperate last-ditch battle at Alpha Centauri, which in this story was the web link directly to Sol -- and Earth. This battle was only won by a hair-- and by some extraordinary good luck. In other words, mankind was hanging on by their fingernails, and the bugs were prying those fingers loose! When IN DEATH GROUND ended, mankind was in imminent peril of going down to annihilation.

The continuation of the story in THE SHIVA OPTION has an opposite character. Men and their allies begin winning early in the book, and the victories are big. In every battle, while there are losses on both sides, Terra wipes out ten bugs for each human (or allied) death. As men and their allies rack up a chain of major victories, the book actually gets less and less interesting. By the midpoint of this book, the ending seems a foregone conclusion. Man is sure to win "by a knockout." As we plow through the final half of this very large book, we wonder if we really need to "observe" each and every individual bug planet go down to destruction.

One very interesting new element that adds to THE SHIVA OPTION is the reemergence of the bugs' "old enemy." Men are the bugs' new enemy, of course. The old enemy had disappeared by fleeing the bugs centuries before-- a last strategy to avoid racial destruction. Now, suddenly they are back!

It is very bad karma that the bugs should once again collide with their old enemies while in the middle of a war of attrition with mankind. They are already losing-- now they have to divert a major part of their fleets to counter this new threat.

I liked THE SHIVA OPTION a lot. But unfortunately, one-third into the book you realize that the end is a foregone conclusion--that mankind is stretching out a great technological lead and increasingly wiping out fleets of bug ships. So where's the suspense? I still plowed through to the end because the battle descriptions are so well done. Weber (with White, I suppose) has to be one of the very best future war writers out there, along with David Drake and Keith Laumer.

This is the fourth book in the series, the order of books is Crusade, In Death Ground, The Shiva Option, and Insurrection. (Insurrection was written first, but it takes place last.) The series is fascinating, well thought out, and full of great sci-fi military action, so I suggest you pick it up sometime. The Shiva Option, however, doesn't live up to the rest of the series.

The Shiva Options has great military action, but the plot is too simplistic at times and could have used better editing. There are far too many coincidences and unrealistic deductions by the characters. For instance, one enemy world changes its deployment based on what happened at another enemy world even though the book previously stated that those two worlds aren't in contact. To make matters worse, it becomes obvious pretty early how the book will end. The book bogs down in the middle, and you almost want the good guys to lose just so something interesting happens.

The publisher, Baen, has a two hundred page preview on their website. Or if you're interested in other books that have a lot of good sci-fi military action and a great plot, pick up the Honor series by David Weber or A Hymn Before Battle by John Ringo.

The Shiva Option, while not as exciting as In Death Ground, is a worthy sequel and ending for the two book series.

Weber and White once again put together a good mix of action and drama, and continue on with Humanity's war with the Bugs. However, it has a much different feel than the first book.

The roles reverse, and seemingly all to quickly. All of a sudden, Humans were back on top, and through way too much luck. This luckily happened, that luckily happened, which proved to be the deciding matters. While this doesn't keep the book from being enjoyable, it does put somewhat of a damper on the over all feel.

The ending, unfortunately, was not nearly as climatic and it should have been, and seemed rushed. Be it Weber and White just got tired of typing, or they thought fans would get bored, the ending was not the most exciting part.

All in all The Shiva Option was still a good book and a worth while read. If you read In Death Ground, you should definitely read the Shiva Option, and not just because it was the end of the series.

"The Shiva Option" certainly is enjoyable, and a real page turner, but it is marred by the two maps in the front of the book, which disagree with each other, and with the text.

One map has a legend (I think), but the print is so tiny it is unreadable, even under a magnifying glass. (I am referring here to the paperback). Even the names attached to the stellar systems are all but unreadable. There is definitely nothing on either map which is labeled as the "Anderson Chain," which is much referred to in the text. While it is possible to figure out approximately which points on one map are the Anderson Chain, there is still an uncomfortable vagueness.

The reader is often left to wonder how someone got from one specified place to another; the path is often anything but clear.

If the maps were readable and in agreement with the text, I could probably have justified giving it 5 stars; it would be very close to 4 1/2.

watziznaym@gmail.com

Definitely a book that satisfies the palate and the mind. It concludes the story of the war with the arachnoids started in In Death Ground. A war of righteousness and of survival. In which the Orions and the Terrans fight for their very survival, together, as they were meant to. New leaders of the Navy, of both races, will take up the fight and rise to the challenge. New alliances will be sought, after all the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

The conclusion will feature several battles that lead the way to victory. We will find out more about this mysterious enemy of the Terrans and how to eradicate them once and for all. The map which contains the space lanes will be your guide, your map, and your game board. It will show the movements of friend and foe alike, as they grope through the darkness. I found myself rather attached to that mind, looking at it and seeing how close the enemy was to a specific star system. Certainly it makes logistical sense.

This book is fine space opera, featuring the battle of humanity vs the aliens combined with Weber's military sci-fi prowess.

While I didn't like the first book in the series all that much this book provided a worthy conclusion to the first book. I also liked the fact that there was some charecter development in this installment. My favorite new addition has got to be that of a Glossary at the back of the book, this way if you are confused about a particular term you can go back and look it up. This solves my biggest problem with the first book