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Title:
Hell Divers
Series: Hell Divers #1
Author:
Nicholas Smith
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Genre:
SF
Pages: 290
Words:
104K
Publish: 2016
Normally,
I add links to other bloggers’ reviews at the end of my review, but
I wanted to make sure that the two bloggers who inspired me to read
this got their credit. So bear with me as I digress momentarily.
Dave
read this back in December ‘24 and put up his review earlier this
month. He talks about his own little journey of discovery with this
book and the video game that came after. It’s the kind of “journey”
review that I enjoy reading.
Both
Dave’s and my own journey began with Swords and Spectres’ review
of the book in 2019. He gave it 5stars and it sounded really good. So
it was on my radar but not quite enough to get on my tbr list. Then
in January of this year Swords reviewed an audio version and
downgraded his review to 3stars. I still liked what he wrote so
between his and Dave’s reviews, I added it to my tbr and I finally
got around it to it this month. That’s actually a pretty quick
turnaround, as my tbr is about two years long.
Ok,
now to the important part, MY PART. I read this book and gave it
3stars. The end.
Hahahahaha,
just kidding. Yeah, yeah, I know, I’ve done that in the past, but
not today. Today you will read every word I write, no matter how long
winded I get or how off topic I go, because I AM BOOKSTOOGECUS!!!!
(parades around with a gladius upraised)
The
(yawn) post-apocalyptic setting is offset by the fact that there are
only 1000 humans left (approximately) and they all live in two giant
skyships. These skyships were the original instruments of doom that
delivered the bombs that destroyed the Earth as we know it back in
World War III. Originally, there were a lot of these skyships, but
now, roughly 250 years after dooms day, there are only two left. The
others have all fallen to the Earth through various issues, whether
mechanical or societal. They are nuclear powered and thus mutation is
at play, and it’s not the X-Men kind of mutation, but REAL mutation
that leads to death. Things are desperate and have been since the
beginning.
In
this story one of the two ships crashes in the worst place on Earth,
called Hades, because it was desperate to recover some nuclear
thingamajigs so it could stay aloft. The other skyship attempts to
come to its rescue, but by the time they arrive, the other ship has
already crashed. The problem is that in attempting to reach Hades,
“our” skyship sustained damage, necessitating that a group of
Helldivers go into Hades on a do or die (for everyone) mission. They
need Power and Parts.
Our
main character is named Xavier but goes by X. It is almost like the
author WANTED this to get turned into a video game with a nameless
protagonist for the gamers to step into his shoes. He’s been on
almost 100 dives, while the typical life span of a Helldiver is 15
dives. He goes on one dive and is the only man to survive. It pretty
much breaks him and THEN the other ship crashes and everything I said
before comes to the forefront. So X has to lead a new team and all
the other teams to Hades, the worst place in the world, to recover
stuff. Half of them die on the dive down, alone. Then they come
across mutants that reminded me of the various zombie things in the
Resident Evil movies. Lots of running, shooting, jumping and chasing.
Eventually, they find what they need, get the supplies back to the
dropship, send it back up to the skyship and the surviving Helldivers
also ascend. Only X is left behind. And there is no way for anyone to
know that he is still alive on the ground.
Like
I said, VERY video-game’y. Not necessarily a bad thing, but one
that kept it from being a real novel in my opinion. It read like
those novelizations of games or movies. So there was 1star knocked
off for that.
The
second knocked off star was because of how things were setup “in
book” that didn’t make sense to me. Helldivers are putting their
lives on the line every time they jump, so they get special
privileges the night before, ie, booze, drugs and sex. Why? Having
your divers go into a mission hungover, strung out, whacked sideways
is a recipe for disaster. You have all that crap AFTER the mission,
help motivate them to come back alive. And you train them in small
group tactics!!!!! They train for jumping, etc, but every time a
group jumped, once they hit the ground, they always, ALWAYS split up
to cover more ground, even though they knew how dangerous everything
was. With absolutely predictable results of people dying by the
bucketload. It made me gnash my teeth, especially when the number of
people left is dwindling so fast. And of course, it is at this EXACT
moment in time that a revolution by the Underdecker’s takes place.
It was too much happening all at once, all of it bad, for me to
accept. I just rolled my eyes, muttered “stupid writer” and kept
plowing through to the end.
Now
I know that’s a lot of bad and you might wonder why this wasn’t
2stars or even a dnf.
The
action and the corrupted Earth. That Resident Evil vibe I got was
more than enough to keep me going. I love those movies to pieces even
while I know what absolute pieces of trash they are. But they are fun
and awesome. Which leads into the action. The dives themselves were
fraught with peril and with teams getting fried by lightning or
smashing into buildings when their paraglide chutes don’t work
right or monsters eating them as soon as they touched down, the
tension for each dive until the divers returned was dialed up to 7,
maybe even 9 every time and then the final dive into Hades at the end
was an 11 from start to finish.
I
plan to keep on reading this series. I’ll read a couple more, take
a break with a different series, then come back. Keep things from
getting stale, or overdone. Nothing is worse than an overdone action
series.
★★★☆☆
From
the Publisher
More
than two centuries after World War III poisoned the planet, the final
bastion of humanity lives on massive airships circling the globe in
search of a habitable area to call home. Aging and outdated, most of
the ships plummeted back to Earth long ago. The only thing keeping
the two surviving lifeboats in the sky are Hell Divers - men and
women who risk their lives by skydiving to the surface to scavenge
for parts the ships desperately need.
When
one of the remaining airships is damaged in an electrical storm, a
Hell Diver team is deployed to a hostile zone called Hades. But
there's something down there far worse than the mutated creatures
discovered on dives in the past - something that threatens the
fragile future of humanity.
The
Hell Divers, led by X, get what they need to allow their airship to
survive, but in the process X is left in Hades and that is where the
book ends.
