The Web of Spider (Spider #3) 1.5Stars

 

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Title: The Web of Spider
Series: Spider #3
Author: William Gear
Rating: 1.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages: 668
Words: 241K

This was twice as long as the first book and it was NOT twice as good.

This was very much a religious treatise as much as it was a science fiction “story”. There were pages of Gear using his characters to talk about neo-shamanism and how wonderful it is to serve a god who doesn’t know everything and who is both good and evil.

How anyone could find that desirable is well beyond me.

Gear also takes some heavy handed swipes at monotheistic religions, ie Judaism, Islam and Christianity. Unfortunately, Christianity is the one he focuses on and just ignores the other two.

I wanted to quit several times, but I was reading this concurrently with Neuromancer and that was so bad that I couldn’t tell if my desire to quit was because this book was really that unenjoyable or if Neuromancer was just sucking the reading joy from my life. Looking back now, its obvious to me this book WAS that bad and I should have dnf’d right near the start. One more mark against Neuromancer for destroying my senses in regarding other books.

★✬☆☆☆

From the publisher

THE FINAL CONFLICT!

The Sirian rebellion had proved the catalyst for the rise of two powerful new forces in the galaxy. Ngen Van Chow, leader of the failed rebellion, had fled to a distant world, establishing a base from which he would launch an interstellar holy war of destruction, a war fuelled by the discovery of a long-hidden technology which could transform ordinary men and women into fanatical soldiers of Deus.

While on the long-lost colony planet of World, the Romanans, known as the warriors of Spider, and their Patrol allies - formerly part of the military and police force which kept order among the worlds and stations controlled by the computer network of the Directorate - prepared for civilization's final stand against this seemingly unstoppable conqueror.