Re: [GZG] [OT] Books (Weber/White/Meier)

-----Original Message-----
>From: Oerjan Ariander <orjan.ariander1@comhem.se>
>Sent: Jul 18, 2008 5:30 PM
>To: gzg-l@vermouth.csua.berkeley.edu
>Subject: Re: [GZG] [OT] Books (Weber/White/Meier)
>
>Eric Foley wrote:
>
>>Further comments below Indy's original message with spoiler warning
here...
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>>WARNING
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>>HERE
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>>THERE
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>>BE
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>>SPOILERS....
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>As for why the Bugs became a paper tiger after Pesthouse, it is quite 
>simple: the entire Hegemony consisted of around thirty inhabited star 
>systems, against the Alliance's many hundreds of systems. Once the Bugs
had 
>run out of mothballed SDNs to reactivate and send into battle, their
only 
>reinforcements were new production units... and even though the five
Home 
>Hives could easily outproduce any *five* Alliance systems, they had no 
>chance in hell against the top five *hundred* Alliance systems.

Yeah.  And ultimately that was really the problem.  It's fundamentally a
war book where the war lacks all drama once the good guys simply survive
the initial thrust.  The Home Hives were described as star systems so
heavily industrialized that any _one_ of the planets in those systems
could outproduce Old Terra herself, and between the five Home Hives
there were about fifteen planets to that tune or so.  Old Terra was
supposed to be the most industrially developed world of the Alliance,
where no other planet even came close.	Maybe all the frontier worlds
supposedly made up for this, and I suppose it was described as a
situation where the Arachnids were more dangerous than any other enemy
the Alliance ever fought... but even at that, would it really have hurt
the story to make the outcome a little more in doubt long term?

At some point, this was kind of the weakness of both this book and
Crusade -- there was not really a lot of long-term doubt about the wars'
outcome once you understood the balance of power between the two sides. 
The Theban war in Crusade was absolutely over before it started, as the
Thebans only had one planet, period, and the Arachnids, while there was
plenty of melodrama about them being creepy-crawly giant spiders with
nukes who liked to eat little kids alive, still were a bit of a letdown
once it all came to it.  They were described in very interesting fashion
in In Death Ground, and then once you discovered "the secret" as to why
they seemed so overwhelming, it was just kind of like "huh?  That's it?"
 It kind of fizzled for me as a result.

E

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