Customer Reviews

Stone Dogs: A Draka Novel

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Any book exists upon two levels: the story, and the stories within. Where this book shines for its plot, its slow, careful setup, it's rich world, in short - it's story, it is truely the glimpses into the lives of the characters - the stories within - that cause this work to stick in your mind, years after reading it.
On the surface, this is an alternate-future fiction that any player of Diplomacy would be proud of. A nation of slaveholders, the Domination of the Draka, is founded in southern Africa. Because they are hated by their primitive neighbors, they are forced to expand and become more warlike. When World War I breaks out, they already own all of Africa. By their existance, they create a second front for the Ottoman Empire. Because the Turks fight a two front war, they are smashed, and assimilated. When WWII comes around, Russia now has a potent adversary on their southern border, and are unable to protect against Germany, or threaten Japan. As a result, the Germans pound the Soviets, the Japanese rule the Pacific, landing on the US west coast. After Russia falls, the Draka are able to press into the overextended Germans, pushing them back, and back again. Each step in this history derives from the previous step, clearly, simply.
So the history works. It is believable, the way a carefully explained chess match is believable. Each move makes sense.
This story takes place at the end of this history. The world is now divided into the Alliance for Democracy (the Americas, Japan, some parts of the far east, england) and the Domination of the Draka (Africa, Europe, almost all of Asia - in short, the other 3/5 of the world), and the two sides hate, fear, and totally fail to understand each other. Eventually, inescapably, this failure of understanding leads the world into total war, a total war started for the most personal of reasons.
So the _Story_ holds up, is gripping and engrossing.
But it is the _Stories_ inside, the tales of individual heroism and cowardice, brilliance and stupidity, the thousand tiny thoughts and decisions that make up the tide of history, that will make you remember this late at night. Not the stories of the main characters, the little stories: the mother who keeps her starving children alive on 'soup', she tells them, soup she made with her blood; the captain of the orbital battleplatform set to self-destruct, closing his eyes and remembering himself a small child (written well enough to bring tears just _recalling_ the passage); the general who, infected by a hallucinogenic virus, cuts off his own testicles with a fire axe. These are the images that will stay with you, long after you put down this book. These are the images that make a book worth reading.

Indra

This is the final book in Stirling's original Draka trilogy. (If you haven't read both Marching through Georgia and Under the Yoke, read them first, or at least read Under the Yoke). I dicussed the background for the Draka trilogy in my review of Under the Yoke - see it for my overall discussion of the series. This review will focus mainly on The Stone Dogs.

In many ways, the Stone Dogs is a much weaker book than Under the Yoke. Whereas Under the Yoke is a brillianly rendered dystopia, the Stone Dogs is more action/adventure/science fiction. I didn't find the characters in the Stone Dogs particularly compelling, and I didn't think Stirling focused as much on the fascinating background as I might have liked. While he certainly did a good job of weaving the history of this alternative timeline with the characters, there was too much emphasis on spying activities. Also, Yolande Ingolfsson is not a particularly compelling main character; she's a monster, in a way that the Draka in previous books were not (compare her to Eric Von Shrakenburg). Also, the scientific advances in this book were ludicrous; both the Alliance (the Americans and other good guys) and the Draka manage to colonize the Solar System in a matter of decades, in a way that turns the Draka universe into space opera. It's a pretty good adventure story, but probably no better than most other space operas.

WARNING!! THE NEXT PARARGRAPH CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE BOOK, INCLUDING THE ENDING! DO NOT READ UNLESS YOU HAVE ALREADY READ THE BOOK OR DO NOT CARE!

What ultimately makes the Stone Dogs so memorable, however, is the ending where - to put it bluntly - the Draka wins a complete and total victory over the Alliance (America), destroying the Alliance utterly in a thermonuclear holocaust. While the means they use to do it (a supervirus that turns the Alliance military into raving lunatics) is pretty unrealistic, it's the very thought of the Draka, the most despicable villains in science fiction, winning completely that turned my stomach -- and yet it utterly facinated me. I have not been able to forget the ending to this book in the three years since I read it -- something which few other books have done. It is a measure of Stirling's skill both that I hated the Draka so passionately, and that I was so upset by their victory. (If Sterling was not as good a writer, the Draka's victory wouldn't mean anything). Now, I'm not criticizing Stirling for his ending -- indeed, the ending, in a peverse way, is the best part of this book, precisely because it was able to stir my emotions so effectly. Indeed, I've often thought that if I had a million bucks, I just might pay Mr. Stirling to write a final book in the Draka saga where they are utterly, and totally defeated.

Enough raving about the ending -- the Stone Dogs is a good book with an unforgetable ending. That's high enough praise for any book.

In his gripping conclusion to the "Domination of the Draka" trilogy Stirling takes the conflict between Alliance and Democracy developed in the second book to new levels. The two opposing systems race to colonize space, research computer viruses and vicious biological plagues in preparation for the final apocalyptic war. In between, the secret service agents of the Alliance and the Draka aristocrat Yolande Ingolfsson, a main character of such depth as rarely encountered. The background as well is developed to such a degree that you have no problems immersing yourself in this strange world of theirs. And Stirling is not afraid to actually let the Final War happen - For the Draka, it never was a question anyway. Those last chapters have been someof the most riveting I have ever read. Buy it !

Urgent: this is the conclusion to the first Draka trilogy, and must be read last. These books--the first is Marching Through Georgia, the second Under The Yoke--are the most compelling and disturbing alternate history I have ever read, and most people have the same response to them. Although the Draka books are already the subject of thousands of Net messages and debates on various lists, they deserve to be far more widely known. Stirling's alternate history branches in the 1770s, with defeated American Loyalists founding a Cape Colony(Drakia, after Francis Drake) and subsequently reinforced by defeated French Royalists and American Confederates, plus the likes of Carlyle, Gobineau, de Maistre, etc., and founding a kind of Anti-America in South Africa, expanding north, grabbing the Ottoman Empire during WWI, and poised for the conquest of Europe as Germany bogs down in Russia in 1942. This sets the stage for Marching Through Georgia, and all the rest follows. It is impossible to overpraise Stirling as a writer of altrnate military history, but he is much, much more: his Anti-America is a brilliant and disturbing provocation to rethink the contours and possibilities of American political culture and history. I have never read anything remotely like these books: they are mostly criticized by people who cannot bear their implications. They are, incidently, hypnotically interesting pageturners, and you'll be cursing when they end--out of frustration that the intoxication of reading them must be suspended. Buy 'em now. This is as good as AH gets.

The Stone Dogs is one of the better science fiction books written in the early 1990s. Indeed, it's so good it should have received either a Nebula or Hugo award. However, the book is about a group of human being that want to enslave all "non race" human, is full of lesbian sex, and is so brutal that the Hugo committee may have put up other nominees just to avoid the controversy.

Stone Dogs picks up where "Under the Yoke" left off. Yolanda Ingolffson is the daughter of rich landowners in the Dracon Empire. Basically, the book can be broken down into two point of views. There is the point of view of Yolanda, the daughter of heros from that worlds WWII. Then there is the point of view of the LeFarges, children of a woman who escaped from Dracon rule in the book "Under the Yoke". The two points of view intertwine, with some violence in parts, and conclude with the final point of view of Gwen Ingolffson, the subject of SM Sterling's next book "Drakon".

Yolanda's life experiences follows the three time frames. First we are introduced to both the Draka land owner life and the school system. Imagine a school system where a child was both pampered and driven by people with the physical stamina of Olympic athletes. The tough physical training of the Draka is shown later on in the book when a Draka defecter is training the LeFarges for covert operations. The defecter comments that hard training in early Draka childhood makes for very tough children and adults later in life. One reason I enjoy the Draka world is you know there will not be some parent saying that "competition would be harmful to the kids". The second part of Yolanda's life is her as a carefree fighter pilot for the Empire. Note, this book was written before Stealth became well known. In the Draka time line most of their fighters look like a permutation of the old SR-71 spy plane. However, Yolanda shows her talent in dog fights and after the fall of India, Yolanda's lover is killed, and her burning hate for the Yankees turns her into the ultimate Draka leader.

Now, the USA in this book is known as the Alliance. All of the Americas are in the USA, not just a fraction of present day North America as in our time line. Both the Alliance and the Draka are in a show down of economic and government styles. The Alliance is the last Republic system in the planet. The Draka is dictatorship of the rich. To combat the Draka the Alliance plans to use a self replicating computer virus to wreck the Draka weapons of war. Some amazon.com reviewers do not thing such a system is possible. Note, on 24 March 2006 there was a write up on Reuters that said hard coded computer ID tags were open to hacking from computer viruses. Since the Draka time line is 50 years ahead of our own the self replicating virus is very possible in our time line.

In some ways I admire the Draka. The Draka earth would be an ecologist's dream, if he was not slaving in a field. Of over 1 billion residents of the Draka empire there are only 50 million Draka citizens. The rest are slaves. The slaves are used to make a Janissary army. However, SM Sterling is sketchy on the details of how that army works. But SM Sterling does go into great detail on the Draka economic system and their plantation system. The reason the Draka economic system works is it's illegal to use any heavy equipment in farming. The plantations are run exclusively through human labor with some animal help. SM Sterling makes it clear that from a Draka point of view the only thing that matters in their economic system are the rulers. The plantation owners are less than 10% of the Draka populace. That means there are less than there are less than 2 million plantations for the land areas of Africa, Asia, and Europe.

The Draka run their lands to the envy of our present day ecologists. The diversity of animal and plant life would be a dream. However, this is perverted into a night mare. The Draka merely want beautiful hunting preserves.

SM Sterling does a masterful job of intertwining the details of Draka life with the story of Yolanda. The lesbian sex is merely a side effect of Draka life. "Citizen" girls are put into single sex boarding schools. They do not have the opportunity to meet their peers of the opposite sex. Conversely, a female Citizen who has relations with a slave (called serf) male will meet capital punishment. The "Citizen" males have their own boarding schools and all the families give the sons a concubine slave. The world of Draka is nothing like earth.

The whole plot of this book is to show the reader the world of the Draka and the build up to the final conflict. Neither the Draka nor the Alliance uses many of the old intercontinental Ballistic Missiles that both America and Russia had in the Cold War. Even in this time of 2006 the old ICBMs are increasing vulnerable to Laser and anti-missile systems. In the fifty-year more advanced time of the Draka the missiles would sitting ducks.

Yolanda and her allies in the Drakon empire force the final conflict by using genetic engineering. SM Sterling writes the Draka would have no problems finding people to test these pathogens on; this time line would have no problems with stem cell research.

SM Sterling ends the book with two appendences. The first is on the economic system of the Draka. It would seem that the Draka empire is less an empire than a system of uber feudal cooperation. Since the objective of the Draka is control of the slaves and pursuit of their own hedonism it works quite well.

The second appendences in on Draka weapons of their empire. I will grant that on this planet their could have been better weapons development in the 1770 to 1870 period of time. The Draka go into WWI with their version of a M-14 rifle. It works. However, the Draka then go into WWII with a rifle that is basically a clone of the Israeli army Galli rifle (an AK-47 action with an M-16 bullet). History has not proven SM Sterling right on this speculation. The 5.56mm bullets have been found wanting in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is a very good chance the 5.56 will be replaced by the 6.5 mm bullet. The lighter M-16 bullet was found wanting in range and could be stopped by a mere rock. A hypervelocity 6.5 mm round can duplicate the lethality of the heavy 7.62 caliber bullets.

And all of these words prove why I have liked "The Stone Dogs". It's an alien world inhabited by people who are brutal slavers with no sense of right or wrong. They are armed to the teeth and rich as possible.

All new readers will enjoy this pure scientific fantasy. All previous readers will enjoy reading about a dysfunctional time line.

Five Stars.

Consider this a mixed review. Mr. Stirling's alternate history envisions a slight divergence during the American Revolution, leading to an eventually different history for South Africa. That altered South Africa expands over the decades to overwhelm all of Africa and eventually most of Europe and Asia. They practice a form of slavery for all subject peoples--basically anybody not born Draka (descendants of the South Africans).

The story in Stone Dogs spans several decades of a very different 20th Century. We follow a central character who is a rapist, a murderer, and a torturer (she's also Draka military). Mr. Stirling is a fine storyteller and the book moves briskly through action and intrigue. For me, the central Draka woman is so vile and cruel that, despite the author's efforts to make her sympathetic, I hated her. Mr. Stirling has set himself quite a challenge with this character and despite all his skills, I think most readers will react as I do to scenes of slavery, raping prisoners, etc.

For me, this book's themes were so odious Mr. Stirling's examination of the broader impact on technological and social change were overwhelmed. Pity, given the skills he manifests in the novel. I very much regret that I can't recommend this book by a fine author and I have decided to not read any of the other Draka novels. Perhaps you will find me priggish, and if you think so, you'll probably enjoy the book's good qualities. I really don't mind if you do.

Wow. Although I'm sure I'd have done better to read the books in this series in their proper order, I'm still glad I snatched up this one when I happened across it; because once again S.M. Stirling has managed to make his "villians" more interesting and understandable than many other writers' heroes.

In this alternate time line, the Loyalists fleeing the lost American Revolution go to South Africa instead of to Canada. The fascinating and terrifying result of that is the rise of not just a new nation, but what regards itself as a new race of humans. The Draka (in honor of Sir Francis Drake), who by the time of this novel have spread their control over all of Africa, the Middle East, and Europe as far north as the English Channel. Britain, along with the United States and the rest of the Americas, belongs to the Alliance for Democracy. The two cultures are natural adversaries, with the Draka regarding every human except themselves as a serf either already subjugated or waiting to be trained for that role. Which is the only proper role for all who are not Draka.

Yolande Ingolffson grows up on her parents' plantation in Italy, one of the landholdings gained by Draka families after the war that brought Europe under Draka control. Like any other Draka child, she's trained from birth to be both warrior and slaveholder. Like most Draka females, she falls in love during adolescence with another girl - interest in males comes later, in the early 20s, when the time for marriage arrives. Yolande, though, finds herself bereaved when her lover is killed early in their shared military service. Myfwany falls to a Yankee ambush on the India frontier, and the crazily grieving Yolande has no idea that the captured woman she brings back to Italy - a newly made serf, who was born free - is an undercover Yankee agent, and the sister of the man whose face Yolande glimpses as her love's killer.

Grief and thirst for revenge drive Yolande through the following years, as she rises steadily in her chosen career and finds herself hailed as a hero of the growing Draka space force. Her uncle, the Draka "Archon" (leader of their government), takes his illustrious niece into his confidence as the Yankee enemies use their superiority in space to plan for what everyone knows must be the final battle, the ultimate showdown - but telling Yolande about the Draka's greatest secret may be the worst mistake the Archon has ever made. Because for all her military accomplishments, and for all her success in building a family in Myfwany's memory, Yolande remains driven by her own demons....

What a detailed and frightening imagination this author possesses! His talent for drawing me into the universes he creates amazed me in CONQUISTADOR. THE STONE DOGS is a far less pleasant book about far more evil people. Stirling drew me in just the same, and held me captive until I'd read the book's final paragraph. Highly recommended!

I read this book for a science fiction class which I am currently taking at the University of Southern California. The detail which Stirling employs in his writing is among the best I have encountered in this genre of literature. It is a classic "good vs. evil" plot line. As demonic as the Draka's motives are it is quite interesting to see how they maintain their classical lifestyle with an iron fist. The Alliance is a society whose strength is in technology. And the Draka have devious plans to destroy the Alliance by means of Bio-technology. The novel is a complex chess game in which world domination is the prize. I have not read any other of the Draka Series, but I will no doubt check them out.

I allready have Stirling's 3 volume work 'The Domination' so I bought Stone Dogs and the other two novels primarily for their appendices and the small vignette's that start each chapter. These really add to the story and their ommission was a serious mistake IMHO.

Stirling creates a wonderfully thought out alternate universe where a virulent society manages to dominate Africa, Europe, and Asia in an eminently believable way. The Draka are only reprehensible in the cruelty they show towards their slaves, the rest of their society sounds significantly better than ours. The most chilling part of the series for me is when the Draka are finally able to create genetic changes in their slave classes to ensure their submission to the Dominion.

All through this book I kept looking for a way out for the Alliance.... The claustrophobic feeling of impending doom was the most skillfully created element in the book and I take my hat off to Mr. Stirling for his ability.