Warrior Book

Pournelle's THERE WILL BE WAR franchise had fallen into a creative rut by volume 5. There's a lot of filler here: three installments from ongoing series that read more like vignettes than stories, a few poems (mostly public domain), and several nonfiction essays, mainly of the pro-SDI, Beware-the-Rooskies-Me-Boyo variety. These, unless you've an interest in 30-year-old defense policy debates, may safely be skipped*. Of the stories, allow me to say the following (minor spoilers follow):

He Fell into a Dark Hole: A CoDominium task force searches for a starship trapped by a black hole. Competently written, but dated in its science (those caught by the black hole experience no time dilation) and borderline misogynistic in its treatment of female scientists.

Coup: Recontact of a lost colony, whose barbaric inhabitants' code of honor proves less barbaric than the advanced explorers'.

The Wedding March: One of a series of vignettes about a community in post-apocalyptic Ireland that has reintroduced droit de seigneur. This installment includes an offhand apologetic for rape. Charming.

Victory: Combat between airships and slow aero planes on a dense-atmosphere world. Don't remember a word of it.

Final Solution: a trivial just-so story with a whiff of xenophobia.

Masterplay: Part of a series by William Wu on a near future in which legal duels are resolved with computer war games. A boring installment, this, which reads much like a public-school story.

The Interrogation Team: one of David Drake's Hammers Slammers fictions. It's rarely a good idea to empathize too closely with the captives you're interrogating.

A Time of Martyrs: Intriguing time-travel thriller set in modern (1980s) Libya and Iraq. Too focused on exposition rather than description and character, but unusual nonetheless.

The Road Not Taken: Minor classic by Harry Turtledove, involving an invasion of Earth by giant bears with muskets. It's less silly than it sounds.

The Day and the Hour: A mashup of two SF concepts: in a future war between a Soviet England and an independent Scotland, a battle is fought between a time-displacing artillery team and a precognitive recon unit. Points for originality.

House of Weapons: Another story from Dickson's Pilgrim milieu, focusing on a bureaucrat collaborating with alien invaders. Not much action or military content.



*I suspect Castalia House, which reissued this volume in 2016, left in the badly-dated nonfiction essays, without any modification or comments from the editors, because it was desperate to secure Jerry Pournelle's permission and blessing.