F/SF

Excellent Space War stories

Read a lot of Berserker short stories as a kid, these collections are great... still better stories that most modern works from others ( )

URANIA COLLEZIONE NR. 183

  This review is written with a GPL 3.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at Bookstooge.booklikes.blogspot.wordpress.leafmarks.tumblr.com by express permission of this reviewer.   Title: Berserker Series: Berserker Author: Fred Saberhagen Rating: 2.5 of 5 Stars Genre: SF Pages: 179     Synopsis: Humanity has spread through the stars and every intelligent race is so ultra-peaceful that when an ancient set of planet size killing machines wake up, Humanity is the last chance of All Life in the Entire Universe.   My Thoughts: I read this back in highschool and all I can remember from that time was that I found the overall tone rather dry.   Well, this time through I STILL found this dry and bordering on the line of plain old boring. A series of short stories that were tangentially related through various characters. Of course, each story is dealing with the Berserkers.   Berserkers, left over machines from an ancient race so old that there isn't even a record of them except for the Berserkers, were created to be death dealers in a war so vast that it got out of control and the Berserkers wiped out their masters.  And now they are OUR problem.   This should have been cool, thrilling and edge of your pants exciting. But it wasn't. Saberhagen seemed to do his best to be pedantic and putting his words together like he was building a brick wall instead of a thrilling roller coaster. There was no menace, no real sense that the End of Everything is upon us. The narrator was an alien, but that was no excuse for how text-book like this was.   There are several more books in the Berserker series, but I certainly will not bother with them. I don't want to take a drink of water with every chapter I read. " ( )

Fred Saberhagen was primarily a Sf writer. Bron in 1930, he died in 2007 at 77.. His wrote Sf for 41 years, for 38 of them he write an extended story called "The Berserkers" composed of novels and short stories. They focused on killer machines and cover a vast territory. This book is made up of the first set of short stories.