We were fighting on the wrong side, of a war we couldn’t win. And that was the good news.The Ruhar hit us on Columbus Day. There we were, innocently drifting along the cosmos on our little blue marble, like the native Americans in 1492. Over the horizon come ships of a technologically advanced, aggressive culture, and BAM! There go the good old days, when humans only got killed by each other. So, … other. So, Columbus Day. It fits.
When the morning sky twinkled again, this time with Kristang starships jumping in to hammer the Ruhar, we thought we were saved. The UN Expeditionary Force hitched a ride on Kristang ships to fight the Ruhar, wherever our new allies thought we could be useful. So, I went from fighting with the US Army in Nigeria, to fighting in space. It was lies, all of it. We shouldn’t even be fighting the Ruhar, they aren’t our enemy, our allies are.
I’d better start at the beginning….
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If you like comedy with your sci-fi then this one’s for you. I’d say this story really takes off when you meet Skippy halfway through.
Love the sci-fi genre. Alanson has come up with an action-packed and hilarious take on the Earth vs Aliens idea.
I do not normally read sci fi, but Alanson’s world-building and his characters are so fully-realized that these books are amazing to read, even though they are not in my normal wheelhouse. I have enjoyed all of the books from this series. I should note that this starts out a touch slow, but it’s well worth reading on to get to the meat of the story. If you have ever wanted to give Sci fi a shot, this is a great place to start.
Great Science Fiction with Out of the Box Strategy!
This was a great book. It isn’t your stereotypical one ship vs many ships kind of book. There are space battles, strategies, and clever dialogue. There’s a good amount of science fiction that sounds like “real” science, which is great in a type of book that needs to astound us with high level technology.
Without spoiling too much, this is similar to the Koban series but also is unique in its own way, where humanity has to deal with aliens that do not have good intentions. There are different types of aliens to read about. Humanity gets an edge from something that sounds plausible. I will write some general information about the book in this review because I’ve read some boring science fiction books with boring dialogue and one boring ship against the many kind of thing, which isn’t my style. This isn’t like that at all.
This was a really funny book too. The author adds some original ideas into this series and there are many types of situations where I try to guess what kind of tactics the main character will think up next, and can’t think of it before it actually happens. The ideas are just that good.
This series does have semi-massive space battles (more so in later books) but it’s not really a space pirate book. There’s politics in the book, which isn’t overdone, or else it would be boring. Prepare to be astounded.
I was on book 4 when I wrote this review on Amazon Kindle. I couldn’t write a review before then because I was so into this series I didn’t have time to write a review until I got that far:)
No one expected the alien invasion force to land at Thompson Corners, northern Maine aka East ahh… Nowhere. And that no one includes the aliens themselves, the Ruhar, or hamsters as they would soon be called. But Joe Bishop, home on leave from the Army, knows his duty is to resist. After all, everyone in town has a gun because everyone hunts, or at least needs to keep bears away from their backyard bird feeders.
Even when Joe’s militia band become a mechanized unit (after tactically acquiring an ice cream truck painted with a giant purple cartoon dinosaur) repelling an alien invasion from a vastly tech-superior race is not going to be easy.
The ‘Barney’ incident is the first in a succession of tricky situations Joe finds himself in as the human race sends out the UN Expeditionary Force to aid our new alien “allies”.
When the hamsters arrived on Columbus Day, humanity woke up to the fact that it was living in a very, very dangerous galaxy. If we are to survive, Joe and his crew will have to make the right calls, every single time.
Given that their most powerful alien friend sees them as a group of monkeys with the intellect of bacteria (perhaps paramecium in the case of humanity’s finest examples) the future doesn’t look good.
Columbus Day is a lot of fun. The banter and the sarcastic humor of the first-person delivery gives it a lot of charm and the main character is someone I can’t help but root for. It’s not all lightweight, though. The perils are real, the missions challenging, and the price of failure inconceivable.
This was one of the best books I read in 2017, this book has it all, trust me when I tell you reading this book will force you to read the next 8 book’s in this series plus all the in between books so get ready because this is a great series.
First I’m going to say I give this audiobook an enthusiastic four stars. Why do I specify audiobook? Because I abhor books told from the first-person point of view and I never would have read this book in paperback form. But…
What sold this book to me was the way the narrator told it. The narrator easily captures the humor and wry wit the story is told with. He expresses an enormous range of emotion and vocal acrobatics; male voices, female voices, deep voices, higher pitch voices, clear voices, husky voices, various human language, and alien language accents all seem to be performed effortlessly. The main character, Joe’s, voice is husky and a little gravelly. It was pretty amazing.
The first chapter had left me wanting, but I was left curious that I was willing to keep listening. I didn’t really get into it until the story left Earth and headed out into space. The story follows Joe, a little slowly but not so slowly that I got bored, through his acclimation from being a U.S. Army grunt into being a grunt in a united Earth military forces and learning how to use alien weapons.
The main character Joe is charmingly relatable in an incredibly average way. He’s got a chivalrous sense of honor, which he even admits on a few occasions interferes with him seeing the women in the military as women (to be treated chivalrously) first and (he is aware they are perfectly capable) soldiers second. This changes as the book progresses and his female compatriots work effortlessly with the male soldiers under his command to fight against their alien enemies. He is admittedly failable and devastatingly human, with hopes, fears, love interests, and unease with responsibilities which he knows are far beyond his training.
I can’t speak to the accurateness of the military aspects of the book. The rest of the story is delightfully engrossing.
Columbus Day is not a “fast-paced” story. But it’s not slow either. It’s a nice moderate pace with an adventure that unfolds evenly and consistently. There’s no dead space in this story because even when there’s no action there’s still revelations of information that is critical to the story and development of the character. Still, it is the incredible performance of the narrator which pushes this story from three-point-five stars up to four.
Definitely worth 4 stars
I loved the first book in this series. The characters are unique and the story is fast-moving.
Wasn’t thrilled with this one. Mountains of exposition and light on action. The high point of the book is an artificial intelligence you meet about 1/3 the way in. This character carried the entire book, as most of the other characters are flat and lack any depth to their personality. I will say that I bought the second one strictly for the AI’s arc. Don’t know if I will go for book 3.