"The countdown continues
in Earthrise, coming from
Ace Books in the fall of 2002!"

After investing 19 precious days reading a book that I thought had an ending, and I come to the above statement, I believe I have a right to be disappointed. I quadruple-checked Deathday's dust cover and located no notice that it was "number 1" in a series of books.

Deathday by William C. Dietz (another author who should go faceless)is a good old fashioned Earth versus alien invaders story. And while having one big strike against it being a 'Surprise! I'm book one in a series', it also deserves kudos for not having even one explicit sex scene in it.

Oh but Dietz's character's utter the most powerful word in the English language (sadly it is no longer 'freedom') and that is 'nigger'. And author Dietz will probably be hung with a noose from the nearest tree for using it too. (Oops, forgot we cannot use the word 'noose' either. Sorry.)

His concept is that the insect-invaders, the Zin's, being dark-brown, and many African-Americans also being dark-brown, the Zins make our human blacks overseers of the whites just as the Zin's are masters of their own lighter-skinned brethren, the Fon. Got that?

The ruling Zin race is able to leap thirty feet straight up and sometimes come squat down on an unwary human, and are as ruthless as ruthless can be and I loved it. Their religion, which causes them to conquer Earth in order to build their temples, has more fables and falsehoods than Scientology. (Knock! Knock! Who's that at my door but Cruise, Smith, Travolta and Phoenix, Arizona's own 'Wonderful Russ'?)

'White Separatists,' American-Blacks segregated out by the bugs for the higher slave positions, professional ex-soldier bodyguards for the black human 'president', 'Survivalists', a love triangle, and hidden unrest among their fellow-cockroaches-made-slaves, all add to the suspense, turmoil and action of Deathday.

The title of Deathday refers to another unique and interesting concept author Dietz dreamed up concerning the life-cycle of our alien-invaders.

Some of the metaphors are silly. One being that, since the Zins have pincers and not hands, several times an idea is rejected "... out of pincer." Har! Get it, ha, ha, ha, not.

I found more than one odd metaphor along the lines of, "... as the Suburban's huge mud and snow tires whispered down the street ..." I've heard mud and snow tires, but I've never heard them "whispering down" any of my streets. He also lards his sentences with so many adjectives that rather than drawing the reader deeper into the scene, he is distracted by having to chew up and then spit out so many unneeded descriptors.

Deathday is a good 'Mankind versus the Aliens' book. And if you don't mind reading several books to get to the conclusion, it'd be a fun series to read. However, I continue to be upset by being tricked into buying a book that does not end when I have a good-sized unread library of books that do have endings and are waiting to be read.


( )

Boy was I surprised I liked this. It's no Footfall, but what is? There's a little too much racism though. I think it's integral to the plot, and it meshes with the story well, but you keep running into it. I'm not a racist, but I'm not anti racist either, I'm just not interested enough in other people to care if they are racists or not.
I was a little surprised that this is a series, so I'll definitely look for the next one, and then I'll decide if I'm going to read more of his work after that. I am certainly not going to read any of his Star Wars books, and if I'd known he was a SW fan writer, I'd probably have ignored him. As it is, he was a random pick off the library shelf. ( )

The human race is conquered by aliens and the surviors are forced to build things for them.