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Chargement... The Course of Empirepar Eric Flint, K. D. Wentworth
Chargement...
Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. On the one hand: interesting aliens with their own culture and morals and ethics, which are very (ha!) alien from the way humans view things, including even a simple thing like 'what is time?'. On the other hand: the US is of course the best country that fought the alien conquerors the longest and bravest while several European countries and Japan surrendered almost right away, and humans are absolutely superior to the aliens in tech an fighting spirit and ingenuity, as even the aliens come around to seeing. Which, well, I guess maybe I also wouldn't love a book where clearly humans were the inferior species, but it all felt a bit grating and smug. Throw in a quick passage where the female MC reflects that it's a pity the aliens have no sexual interest in human women, so that her 'friends' might have their (admittedly rather rose-tinted and romanticized) views on the aliens corrected via some rape, and I was uh, less than charmed. Just not my cup of tea. This is a fairly interesting and innovative take on the 'Earth controlled by aliens' theme. It is the first part of a series and it jumps right into things. Earth is under control of the alien Jao and has been for some years now. The Jao, a sort of seal/walrus-like mammalian species has slightly better technology and troops specially bred for warfare. They have occupied the Earth and have organized it the way they are used to, the Jao can't contemplate doing things any other way. That means clans and families are the primary organization, so there are some rivalries between them. The Jao keep saying that a worse alien race, the Ekhat are coming and that humans and Jao must prepare. Unfortunately, they don't explain anything to the humans, so they all they get is rebellion. When a new high ranking Jao is assigned to the planet, can he change anything? I thought this was well done, even though it jumped right into the middle of things. It is also somewhat self-contained and reads like a single book, I didn't feel it was incomplete at the end. It did remind me quite a bit of the Chanur novels, but not in a bad way. A good attempt at human-alien relations where humans don't have the upper hand. Twenty years ago, the Jao conquered the Earth. Humans are the fightin’est species the Jao ever encountered, making this conquest the most difficult of any the Jao had pulled off before. Americans were the fightin’est and held out the longest, thus suffering the most in the way of physical destruction, a fact that pleases some other nations (most especially Japan). Even so, the Jao occupation is headquartered in the US, with the puppet president’s daughter Caitlin a hostage raised very close to the Jao governor, so close that she’s learned a lot about how they think and speak; Jao think about honor and duty differently than humans (though again they’re closest to the Japanese, according to a couple of POV characters). Tully, a resistance fighter, and Caitlin, along with some other plucky humans, get swept up with a new Jao from a different clan than the governor; Jao politics might just change the oppression under which humans are suffering. But the Jao are on Earth for a reason: they need resources to fight the Ekhat, who want to destroy all non-Ekhat life in the universe. And the Ekhat are coming. Okay, so this is roughly 75% Red Dawn with space invaders. And, while Flint and Wentworth go to great lengths to explain some of the plot girders (the Jao’s ignorance of/contempt for projectile weapons as opposed to lasers; why the genocidal Ekhat might bother to fight a ground war rather than obliterating whole planets at one blow; the Jao’s lack of imagination compared to humans), there’s still a palpable sense that the scenario works the way it does because the authors carefully tweaked the rules to produce the maximum fun/cheerleading for human ingenuity. On the other hand, the book does what it does reasonably well, and it actually tries to deal with the question of what happens when the conquerors cannot be kicked out on their butts. As long as you can swallow the American = human stuff, it’s a little like reading David Brin with the human inferiority substantially sucked out and some swashbuckling put in. aucune critique | ajouter une critique
Appartient à la sérieJao Empire (1)
The Battle to Free the Earth May Destroy It Instead! Thundering Space Action by the Authors of 1632 and Black on Black. Conquered by the Jao twenty years ago, the Earth is shackled under alien tyranny - and threatened by the even more dangerous Ekhat, one of whose genocidal extermination fleets is coming to the solar system. The only chance for human survival is in the hands of an unusual pair of allies: a young Jao prince, newly arrived to Terra to assume his duties, and a young human woman brought up amongst the Jao occupiers. But, as their tentative alliance takes shape, they are under pressure from all sides. A cruel Jao viceroy on one side, determined to drown all opposition in blood; a reckless human resistance on the other, which is perfectly prepared to shed it. Added to the mix is the fact that only by adopting some portions of human technology and using human sepoy troops can the haughty Jao hope to defeat the oncoming Ekhat attack - and then only by fighting the battle within the sun itself. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999Classification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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It’s great to read an adult SF novel without the infantilisation bits of contemporary SF (even when said “contemporary SF” is branded as “adult SF” it still read as “YA-SF-for-morons”…Go figure. ( )