Planetary Assault

Yes. The stories revolve around the courage and resourcefulness of humankind when our spacesuits are up against the crater lip on various god-forsaken planetoids, uncharted pieces of space debris and back water moons. There is a common theme in each story - if you are an interstellar alien invasion force and cherish thoughts of messing with humans or taking our stuff you better clear you calendar, have backup bullet / laser beam stoppers in transit and remember to pack several extra pallets of alien body bags. I recommend this book with a clean conscience.

Sargent Chen in Heppner's story. He never waivered in his mission to obliterate every Cyborg he could register on his personal alien corpser. He was always jacked up on some techno goof ball "performance enhancer", thus he had absolutely no patience with anyone bleating some sad sack casualty's story about this or that leg being blown off or being taunted by that cocky disembodied "Web Mind". That dude REALLY pissed him off! Even though he rarely if ever had a backup plan when the unforeseen yet inevitable SNAFU event occurs, or any plan at all come to think of, you can rest assured that he will be the first to jump off that space torpedo onto the methane ice field, or be out in front of some assault squad screaming base obscenities and emptying his magazine into some out of luck space scum. If I found myself in a foxhole on some toxic icy planet when nasty things are splatting into fans I want Sargent Chen, my battle buddy, next to me pumping shells through any and all opposing forces.

Not any specific scenes, but I come away from listening to this audiobook with a new appreciation of just how quickly humans can rack up a massive body count when they set their minds to it. The sound of penetrator rounds slamming into some hapless alien invader never got old.

I fully expect to get mixed feelings on this review - It's more on a personal level of my preferences regarding good military scifi. And since it's my opinion, I'm okay with that. So, let's rev this up...

This is, if you will, a mixed bag of nuts. Various authors provide a scifi military short story to create an small omnibus, if you will.

I like these authors and their stories, but I'm not a fan of short stories. Yes, it's somewhat the rage in certain circles. It IS a bit trendy lately, with authors trying to write stories that comprise a page or two, or three or fifty, and say as much as they can in as little space as possible.

In my mind, that defeats the very idea of expression. You don't define a great work by it's page count - You define it by the richness, definition and completion of the effort.

Certain authors do this NATURALLY, because it's who they are and how they write. It's their very nature, and when it happens, it's a glorious thing.

Military science fiction, by its very nature, needs length to some degree, to ramp up the listener into the author's milieu and to suspend disbelief, which is always essential to good military scifi writing. If rushed via a short story, it will inevitably boil down to...

"X shoots lasers and missiles at Y, BANG!, Y shoots lasers and missiles back at X, POW!, a mysterious secret is revealed, a hero arises, and both allow either X or Y to win, or both to die."

You just can't pigeonhole quality military scifi into a short story without giving up something important.

I feel that the authors here all had good stories, but they should be presented as full stories, not short, whet your appetite novelettes. So many questions, so many holes. In fact, these stories are so short, that saying anything about them almost gives it story away in its entirety. I WILL say, hover, that Larson had, in my mind the better of their tiny stories, and that's not just because I like Larson - In this case, he did okay with the span in which he wrote.

Again, they're all interesting, but thin. And thin doesn't cut it for me.

So, while these are pigeonholed, they're good, but not great - They need larger real estate to thrive.