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Tuesday, 13 December 2011

Been reading: David Weber & John Ringo; March To The Sea

Screw Jane Austen. I want books where men ride dinosaurs.

  At some point over the last couple of years John Ringo became one of my regular authors and a consistent  source of entertaining mayhem.
 After working through the "Council Wars" and "Posleen War" books I've got onto his collaboration with David Weber - the "Prince Roger" series.
 The setup is simple. A spoiled younger princeling and his less-than-thrilled bodyguards are spacewrecked on a hostile planet. To get home they will have to march across an entire continent, cross a sea nobody has ever crossed before and retake a spaceport occupied by a heavily armed enemy.
 As seems to be common with John Ringo books, the characters have to spend a lot of time worrying about logistics. As an example, if the party don't get back to civilisation in a set amount of time, their vitamin supplements will run out and everybody dies a painful death.
 Don't worry. When the action arrives there's plenty of it. mostly involving massive firepower and bloody-mindedness, and the bodies get stacked high indeed.
 Although Prince Roger himself starts the series as a surly Emo prat, he grows out of it and watching him mature into a competent, likeable leader is one of the strong points of the series. Add a dynamic supporting cast of career soldiers, warrior natives and bloody huge reptiles and Weber and Ringo are onto a winner here.

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