Very run of the mill "two ancient civilizations fight each other for eternity" stuff, but has some quality space battle tactics descriptions which I liked a lot.

This book was released around the end of the first season of Voyager and probably largely written before the show even went on the air. Because of that I'll give the author a little bit of slack.

I didn't like this book. Although if follows the Voyager-typical "Everyone tells Janeway its a really bad idea to do this thing, she ignores them and does it anyway" style, I really feel like the characters were way off. And not just off because we didn't know much about them at the time, but off in that they didn't feel like Starfleet Officers. The aliens told her they weren't interested. Go away. She ignores them and sends a shuttlecraft to force its way on to their ship and tries to force them to take on ambassadors to negotiate a peace. What kind of Starfleet Captain would do that? Even Janeway wouldn't.

The ending was anticlimactic and pretty disappointing. If left me wondering what the entire point of the book was. And that was disappointing because initially I felt like there was a lot of potential in the alien species and what had happened to the planets in this sector. My interest was piqued. I would not recommend this book. ( )

(I've not got my notes on hand, so this will less detailed than usual.)

This book follows the usual 'Voyager finds a rumor that they might get a way home' plot, with Janeway willing to chance destruction of the ship for a quicker way home. That's reasonably consistent with the show, I guess, but since we know there's no real danger to the ship, I don't think it works as well to show how serious Janeway is about getting back home.

The idea of a huge battle involving everything that a civilization has to put into it and lasting for a very long time isn't too new, although Ragnarok perhaps goes a bit further toward showing how far they've gotten, stripping every last ounce of metal out of whole planets to build ships for the war.

I liked the look at the alien race that spoke in imperatives--it's always fun to see how authors will try to make a really different sort of alien. The ones in the previous book (The Escape) were more or less like extra-bureaucratic humans, so it's nice to see something a little more alien this time.

Overall, this was a reasonably fun read, though maybe not quite as good as its predecessor. ( )