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| The Road to Damascus (The Bolo Series)
Hardcover
Author: John Ringo, Linda Evans
Publisher: Baen
Release Date: March 2004
ISBN-10: B000VY9D4Y
Average Customer Rating:
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Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
When a ruthless political regime seizes power on a world struggling to recover from alien invasion, a former war hero finds herself leading a desperate band of freedom fighters. Kafari Khrustinova, who fought Deng infantry from farmhouses and barns, finds herself struggling to free her home world from an unholy political alliance, headed by the charismatic and ambitious Vittori Santorini, which has seduced her young daughter with its propaganda and subverted the planets Bolo, using the war machine to crush all political opposition. To free her home world, Kafari must somehow cripple or kill the Bolo she once called friend. Unit SOL-0045, "Sonny," is a Mark XX Bolo, self-aware and intelligent. When Sonny's human commander is forced off-world, Sonny tries to navigate his way through ambiguous moral and legal issues, sinking into deep confusion and electronic misery. He eventually faces a dark night of the soul, with no guarantee that the will understand - let along make - the right decision. And caught in the middle of this volatile battlefield is Yalena Khrustinova, Kafari's young daughter. Will she open her eyes in time to save herself - and millions of innocents - or will Santorini's relentless brainwashing campaign continue to blind her while the tyrant engineers the ultimate destruction of a helpless and enslaved population?
Excellent! One to own and read again...
| Customer Rating: | If you like the work of Niven, Pournelle, and Laumer, you'll love this book. The characters are well done and the plot moves quickly along as with books by Niven or Pournelle. Do you have some books you come back to and read again after a couple years away? This will likely be one of them.
This book alone convinced me find and acquire any similar books by John Ringo. |
Wow - absolutely unreadable, even for Bolo lovers.
| Customer Rating: | Gosh...I love me some Bolos. Have read 5 or 10 other Bolo books, and liked them all. Absolutely could not get through this one. I can't even think of another book that I couldn't stand long enough to finish...usually am able to plow through to the end "just to see what happens," but I just couldn't stomach this.
The authors convinced me right away that the bad guys were really bad. Super bad. Like, Darth Vader bad. But the book is 750 pages long. 750 pages that do nothing bad hammer in that point, over and over again, while the only "normal" characters try to understand "How can they be so bad? How can they do these things?" After about thirty pages of bad things, I didn't CARE why the bad guys were doing them. It's a Bolo book! Just fracking SHOOT them, already! |
Meh.
| Customer Rating: | A few things were good with the book. The epiphany at the end was very interesting. Sonny was a pretty decent Bolo character, the only other character that was any good was the Bolo Tech who was introduced towards the middle of the book. Then there were some really good battle scenes scattered throughout the book.
Otherwise the characters operated at extremes. The mother was a tough sacrificing women who forged a planetary guerilla movement. The daughter goes from being a brainwashed brat from the pits of hell to a noble, tough and strong young woman. The Father is the stereotypical noble soldier who has seen far to much war and bloodshed. The evil government follows this same principle as being way over the top. The list goes on.
If you can ignore the worst points about this book in can be ok. |
Keith Laumer must be rolling over in his grave.
| Customer Rating: | This book is available in the Baen Free Library. If you're enough of a masochist to want to read this book, save yourself the waste of money and download it.
Rather than concentrating on the interesting part -- the moral dilemma of the Bolo -- the book is mainly a right-wing screed against all forms of liberal policy. The bad guys are fascists who hide behind a straw man version of various liberal agenda, from social programs to education to environmentalism, all taken to an unrealistic extreme and turned into a stereotype. The welfare mother stereotype is even here, derided in the book as being fat and lazy, having nothing better to do than eat and produce children. I wish I were kidding about this.
The good guys are two-dimensional stereotypes as well. Either you're an intelligent, compassionate rural gun-toting farmer, or you're a stupid, lazy urban welfare worker or criminal. There's no middle ground. The urban poor are universally stupid, lazy and mean, while the rural folk are universally kind, tough, forthright, and practical.
The planet of Jefferson is a thinly-disguised version of the United States. My favorite: The good President who dies early on is named Abe Lendan. Yeah, he's in essence a version of Abe Lincoln. It doesn't get any more original from there, I'm afraid.
Everything is jiggered to make the conservative rural folk look better than the "liberal" city folk look worse. For example, the native environment on the planet is particularly hostile with man-eating wildlife, which is designed to make environmentalism look especially stupid and make gun-toting look like a particularly good idea in rural areas. Unlike real rural conservatives, the "Grangers" are multi-ethnic and religiously tolerant, carefully scrubbing this carefully-tuned propaganda-style SF "thought experiment" of the one realistic bad part of RL white, rural America that they could have shown, making the good guys even more saintly, and making the situation even more unrealistic. That's right, there's no issue of race or religion in this politics at all, unlike real life... Class is even largely a non-issue, as both the urban poor and the rural poor are broke, it's just the urban poor are broke because they're lazy, stupid, and uneducated and the rural poor are broke because of them durn government types interfering with them.
My personal "favorite": Two of the major characters have a child who is "brainwashed" by the evil education programs of the bad guys. How do they wake her out of it? By slapping her and yelling at her. Um, okay.
Unless you're a knee-jerk conservative or oddly uncritical libertarian, I suggest skipping this book. Smart conservatives and liberals of any stripe will be insulted by the simplistic portrayal of BOTH sides of the political aisle, with long-winded diatribes serving instead of plot. If you took out the diatribes, this would be a short story rather than a novel, which should give you an idea of how slow the plot moves with the diatribes in place. |
Terrible just terrible.
| Customer Rating: | I kept hoping for the Deng or Malconinas or Klingons or someone to blast this loser planet out of existence. The `good guy' oppressed minority is a group called Grangers. With the smoke still billowing after an attack - after paying lip service to how terrible war is they quickly gets down to serious matters - insuring their profit margins are kept healthy. Inspiring selfless patriots all.
The evil aliens races are more clever than the human's. Rather than waste bombs bombing the humans back into the Stone Age, all they have to do is keep clear. See the government than comes to power is determined to drive themselves back into the Stone Age. They don't need any outside help, thank you very much.
The Bolo holds out the longest, but even it turns hopelessly silly. When under attack it observes that the explosion ripped "my port-side threads to confetti." A precision killing machine thinks that to itself? Sadly I'm not kidding. However I'm happy to report that my copy of this stink-bomb shared the same fate as SOL-0045 port-side threads.
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