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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.
