Weapon Book

Books like this are what make me consider my friend's shelf label of 'thrown-with-great-force' as something I might adopt myself.

First off, this is a political book. I am not necessarily opposed to political books. And as a reader of a lot of military science fiction, I am frequently confronted with authors who clearly have political viewpoints to the right of my own *cough John Ringo *cough*.

This doesn't stop me from enjoying a good story and good characters, but I don't enjoy caricatures.

I picked this up, struggled through the initial polemic on the virtues of libertarian-ism and the eeeeevils of Earth's fascist government, and then got to the meat of the story.

Where the protagonist and his compatriots murder billions of innocent civilians. In great detail.

From the Amazon blurb:

Then the Earth forces attacked his home system, and he and his team came out of hiding, attacking and destroying the infrastructure of the crowded planet, disabling transportation and communications in city after city. As a result of his attacks, billions died for lack of the food, water and power which the ravaged system could no longer supply.

That wasn't part of the original blurb for the book or I might not have picked it up.

There's an argument put forth in the book that these civilians are complicit in the fascism of Earth's government and therefore in order to keep the flame of freedom alive on Grainne, their deaths were justified. Because the civilians fail to exercise their rights to control the government, the use of terrorism is justified.

That's where the author lost me.

In terms of military effectiveness, I am sure that such an attack would have a devastating effect on any government and could easily cause changes in governmental policy. It might not necessarily have the desired effect (they have greatly damaged us, let us crush them now since they've already shot their wad) but it would absolutely send a message.

However the moral question is entirely different.

I managed to finish the book, hoping that there was some sort of redeeming grace in the remaining chapters and did not find anything sufficient to balance the core message.

Looking at star-ratings on Goodreads, they appear to be largely positive (4.01 over 922 ratings), but this book turned me off Williamson, probably for life.