Live Free or Die (Troy Rising Series #1) Book

This would have been a fun if utterly mindless little jaunt about aliens invading and humans fighting them off if the author could have not spent every other page stuffing his straight up fascist opinion in with the subtly of a sledge hammer.

I don't use the word fascist lightly. I love Heinlein and find the politics in his books more or less unoffensive. Heinlein certainly writes about brutal militaristic governments, but it is an exploration of those societies and shows both the good and bad. When Heinlein shoves his political opinion in, it is done with a little bit of finesse. You don't have to agree, but it is at least an interesting perspective. The author of this atrocity, John Ringo, should take a lesson from Heinlein.

In Ringo's world, anyone who isn't actively rooting for poor brown people to die is an idiot. I am not exaggerating. There is a point in the book where all the poor brown people die, and the red neck hero of the book declares it is a real shame, but applauds how much this is going to improve the economy. It would be one thing if this was written from the perspective of a red neck fascist, but it is pretty clearly a fantasy world where every even vaguely lefty decision results in doom, and every fascist decision in a win.

My favorite part is when, after all the poor brown people are killed, a virus makes it so that blond women (and only blond women) go into heat and it makes them desperate to breed and more fertile, thus ensuring that the future of the human race will be blond hair blue eyed white people. I didn't even make that up.

Throw on top of this pile of horrors the fact that there is not a single female character with more than a couple of lines (other than one brief villain), and it is pretty hard to not walk away utterly convinced that the author is just a straight right wing fascist nut. And when I say fascist, I mean it in the that he literally want all brown people to die, women to be slaves, and the world to be made up of blond hair and blue eyed people.

If you want to read some decent militaristic sci-fi with a conservative voice, read some Heinlein. This book is on the KKK reading list and I so I really can't recommend this crap to anyone who would feel uncomfortable at a KKK rally.