Out of the Dark Book

I read David Weber's On Basilisk Station a couple years back an enjoyed it. The first of many books featuring Honor Harington, it's Weber's most popular series. My enjoyment of the books went down as they went up in number, but on the whole I appreciated Weber's straightforward military science fiction.

Out of the Dark came to me, like so many books do, from the new fiction shelf at my local library. Weber's name got me to pick it up, and the flyleaf description made the story sound interesting: a very near future military sci-fi novel of first contact. Cool.

The novel starts with a long prologue, which is already a strike against it. Not every prologue is bad, but most of them are, and of the ones that aren't nearly all are unnecessary. A group of aliens are observing the human race. Specifically, they're observing a bloody medieval battle. The aliens are horrified at humanity's violence, and appalled that the vastly outnumbered English manage to defeat the French. Now you know the whole story. It's an interesting idea, to me anyways, but Weber gives the whole thing away before he's even begun his novel.

It's an interesting premise, which is the only thing that kept me reading it. What if the universe is governed by a huge consortium of races that are far more peaceful than we are? What if the aliens arrive at earth and we manage to kick their asses on the ground? It's an odd angle, to imagine that a race of aliens might have the technology to travel the stars but might arrive at earth with only a marginal advantage, not an overwhelming one. Weber explains this in what I felt were reasonable terms given his premise. We'd end up being the terrorists, fighting an asymmetrical war with the occupying alien forces.

As I said, this premise kept me turning pages even through the plentiful scenes of exposition. It felt to me like a good 80% of the novel was either the good guys being one-dimensionally jocular with each other (including the women) or the bad guys explaining to each other in excruciating detail what they were going to do next. The other 20% was really high quality action sequences, which Weber does very well; a little heavy on tech description and jargon, but par for the course with military sci-fi. These action scenes were thoroughly enjoyable, to the point where I was tempted to skip paragraphs and pages looking for the next one.

Up to this point I'd give the novel two out of five stars, maybe two and a half if you like David Weber or military sci-fi. On page 330 a crime is committed against narrative justice and the book drops to below one star. I would break out negative stars for this thing if I could. What is this crime, you ask? Well, on page 330 of a 380 page novel, vampires arrive and kill all the aliens.
No, I am not kidding.

Nothing sets this up. There is no hint in the first 329 pages of the novel that this is a paranormal thriller. It is straight ahead, solid, predictable military sci-fi. Then, when humanity has successfully driven the aliens to the point of despair, and the aliens have decided to cut their losses and sterilize the earth from orbit, and I'm actually interested in finding out how this is going to end, vampires show up. And not just any vampires either; it's Dracula. It's a deus ex machina of the worst possible kind.

And this is from a reader who would probably pick up a book that sold itself honestly as vampires vs. aliens.