17

By Chris Meadows

eyeofstorm One of the great boons to cheap reading matter are the Baen freebie CDs. These promotional CDs are bound into first-edition first-printing hardcovers of select Baen books, or given out at industry meetings and conventions, and contain literally dozens of Baen e-books each.

And best of all, they come with a permissive license that allows free distribution of the CD and its contents, meaning that Joe Buckley at The Fifth Imperium is permitted to host them all for free browsing and downloading.

There is sufficient free reading here to keep anyone occupied for weeks, but today I’m going to focus on one particular series: the “Legacy of the Aldenata” series (also commonly called “The Posleen War”) by John Ringo and various co-authors. This series is currently 12 books long, and the first 11 can be found as e-books in multiple formats on Baen CD #18.

The premise of the series is that, in the year 2001, aliens get in contact with Earth’s government to let us know something nasty is coming: a ravening horde of voracious, rapidly-breeding reptilian creatures called the Posleen, who are expanding from planet to planet, eating all organic life that they find, then moving on.

The Posleen are heading in the direction of a cluster of populated planets belonging to a coalition of allied galactic races—of which Earth is an as-yet-unknowing part. These races have one particular problem in common: an overwhelmingly pacifistic nature (natural in some cases, enforced by ancient genetic engineering in others). It turns out that of all the races populating our part of the galaxy, only humans have the ability to do any actual fighting.

So the coalition of aliens—the master craftsmen Indowy, the scientific Tchpht, the manipulating scheming Darhel, and the mysterious Himmit—forge an agreement with mankind: they will provide us with technology and weapons centuries beyond our current understanding, and help us to defend our homeworld. In return, we put a fighting force together and go out to kick the Posleen off of their worlds. Sounds pretty good so far, doesn’t it?

But things are not always as they seem.

Except for a couple of side novels, the series follows the adventures of Mike O’Neal and his family. O’Neal, a science fiction writer and military veteran, gets pulled into events early on when he is recalled to active duty to help put together the infantry response to the Posleen onslaught.

O’Neal’s wife is recalled to duty as well—and so is just about every other military veteran, including veterans of Vietnam, Korea, World War II, and even the few remaining living veterans of World War I. (The aliens’ technology includes a de-aging rejuvenation process.) As the Posleen grow ever closer, and the situation grows more tense, it becomes clear that there are things the Darhel are not saying—but the full extent of their treachery only becomes apparent when the Posleen arrive.

After the first four books, covering the run-up to the invasion and its arrival and aftereffects, the series jumps forty years in the future to focus on Mike’s daughter Cally, now an assassin for a secret guerilla organization dedicated to countering the Darhel. Over the course of the next ten years, she becomes involved in interstellar intrigues as the political situation teeters precariously.

Then a new threat appears on the horizon that changes everything…

Meanwhile, there are a couple of other side novels, covering the events of the Posleen invasion in different parts of the world, such as Panama and Germany. The novel about Germany, Watch on the Rhine, caused a bit of controversy, given that it makes heroes of a group of rejuvenated German World War II veterans from the SS.

The most recent novel, The Tuloriad, is not available free yet, but can be bought from Webscriptions for $6. It tells the story of a group of Posleen who escape the fighting on earth and go on a quest to find a new way of life for themselves—and of a group of humans who seek them out to bring them the Gospel.

For those role-playing gamers in the audience, there is also a D20 SRD compatible Posleen role-playing game, in .DOC form, on Baen CD #2 (along with an e-book of Posleen fanfic). The document covers events in the first four books only. It was supposed to be revised and reissued commercially for compatibility with the D20 Traveller RPG, but this somehow never ended up happening.

On the whole, I found this series to be well-written and exciting. Ringo is himself a military veteran, so is able to bring a verisimilitude to his writing that many other milSF writers lack. He also has a knack for humanizing his characters (if you can say that about alien characters), making his readers care about people on both sides of the battle.

Of course, there is a downside to that. People die in Ringo’s books. Lots of people. (Five billion people, during the Posleen invasion.) People who don’t deserve it. People you’ve grown to care about over the course of the last few pages, few hundred pages, or few books. They die because of stupid mistakes, because of treachery, or to buy time so that others can escape. If you can’t handle that, this series might not be for you.

Something else that might be hard for some readers to swallow is the politics. Ringo and his collaborators are firmly right of center, and sometimes (or a lot of times) the politics bleed through into his books. Advocates of liberal causes are often presented as idiots, or sometimes even as alien collaborators. But that’s par for the course in any SF written by someone with a political bent.

And needless to say, there’s a good deal of sex, violence, and harsh language involved. Not as much or as twisted as some of Ringo’s books, but about the usual level one might expect for a series involving ravening aliens out to eat humanity, and the class of men who sign up to fight them back. Probably not something to read aloud to the kids at bedtime.

But it’s not all blood and guts. There are some humorous, even downright hilarious elements found in these books, balancing out the somber blood and guts moments. Running through some of the earlier books is a significant thread of reference to the webcomic Sluggy Freelance, which Ringo became an unabashed fan of.

For instance, a giant mobile artillery piece in the first four books is named “Bun-Bun” by its crew of Sluggy fans, and the Sluggy character “Riff” (or, rather, the real-life person Riff was based on) is tuckerized into Hell’s Faire. The book even features a section of selected Sluggy comics, including some original strips set in the Aldenata universe. Definitely a must-read for any Sluggy Freelance fan.

This might be a little “too cute” for some people, but it suits me just fine!

One slight annoyance, however, was that in some of the later books, continuity gets a bit sloppy. There’s an event that is presented in Yellow Eyes and Eye of the Storm as happening around 2060, but when it is covered in The Tuloriad it is stated to happen in 2013—except one of the characters refers to other events happening around 2060 during it. Apparently Ringo and his co-author Tom Kratman decided to move the event back in time after the fact—but couldn’t do anything about the two books that already had been written, and forgot to fix everything in the one they were writing.

A bigger annoyance is that, just when things start getting really exciting, it turns out the next book in the series is nowhere on the horizon, so probably won’t come out until at least 2011.

Anyway, if you’re looking for an exciting, action-packed military SF adventure series that will give you at least several days of good reading time, mostly for free, check out the Legacy of the Aldenata. It’s worth reading.

 
17