Reviews for Under the Sun

The average rating for Under the Sun based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-08-01 00:00:00 Margie Avellino HELL YEAH!!! Put a book called "Live Free or Die" in front of an old Heinlein / Poul Anderson SF libertarian like myself AND reference the two grandmasters in the first few pages AND make the protagonist a freewheeling science fiction writer and I'm gonna like it. Lynny likey! This is a fun twist on the first contact sub-genre reminiscent of the aforementioned writers as well as inspirations from or similarities to Arthur C. Clarke and John Scalzi. An alien race delivers our "gate" to the rest of the known universe but are more or less friendly and the interaction goes well. It's when the SECOND group of ETs show up that things get sideways and we realize we are backwoods inbred cousins compared to the rest of the technologically much more advanced races /species / folks. Imagine a scene from the 1996 Roland Emmerich film Independence Day and you get an idea about the boot heel we are under. But fortunately for mankind there is a free thinking entrepreneur who is not giving up and gets a leg up on the first aliens with an unexpected but favorable trade agreement. He uses the leverage to slowly start moving towards a better position to take on our "benefactors" as they insist on being called. Kind of three related novellas put together this is hard SF but fun and told with personality. Not without its blemishes - the pacing is inconsistent and sometimes hard to follow; the technical jargon can get tedious and the characterization can be flat. There were also some glossed over elements that inhibited the plot. Most of all, I think many critics will dislike the overt libertarian political asides and unapologetic anti-government overtones. All said, though, this was an entertaining and fun read and I'll likely read more from Mr. Ringo.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-12-01 00:00:00 Dara Dyer 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.