This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress & Blogspot by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission
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
Click to Open
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.
This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress & Blogspot by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission
Title: The Way of Spider Series: Spider #2 Author: William Gear Rating: 3 of 5 Stars Genre: SF Pages: 395 Words: 151K
The Warriors of Spider ally with the Directorate to invade a rebelling planet. They murder and rape their way across it and subdue it. The mastermind of the rebellion flees with technological secrets at his finger tips.
Yeah, I read this. Wasn’t overly impressed. The Romanans are unbridled rapists and murderers and that doesn’t go down well with me at all. While their brutal savagery is what wins the war, they are not good guys by any stretch of the imagination. Not how I wanted to start this month’s reading.
And I am not looking forward to the final book at all now 🙁
Plus, this cover is a horrible resolution. It’s this bad even on the author’s website. Not cool.
★★★☆☆
From the Publisher
Rebellion on Sirius threatened to become the spark that would set the galaxy ablaze, bringing on the destruction of the Directorate-run empire—a tyranny powered by an elite corps of human, computer-linked brains. The Directorate’s only hope of overthrowing the Sirian rebels rested with three of its once-mighty but now battle-damaged Patrol ships, three backup warships, and a rate of primitive, long planet-bound warriors—the Romanans.
For the Directorate had spent many centuries breeding initiative and the capability for violent action out of the human race. And only on the lost colony of World did true warriors of spider still exist. But would the Romanans willingly join the cause of the star men who had once attempted to destroy their world? And even if they did, could warriors so newly exposed to the weapons of deadly technology defeat a world and a leader ready to utilize legendary tools of destruction more lethal than any humankind had ever known?
This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress & Blogspot by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission
Title: The Warriors of Spider Series: Spider #1 Author: William Gear Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars Genre: SF Pages: 326 Words: 125K
William Gear is publicly known as “W. Michael Gear”, an author recently known for his “Donovan” series. But he’s been around for quite some time. I hate “public names”, so I’ll be giving the author as “William Gear” because that’s his name.
I read this originally back in middleschool or highschool, because the cover on the paperback at the library looked wicked cool. I have also recently decided to dive into the Donovan series but wanted to read some of Gear’s older stuff so I have a decent comparison for his writing style changes. I believe his wife Kathleen is credited on many of their books (they’ve written something like 90) and I could see her finger prints all over this. The descriptions of the clothing alone would have told me that.
They are also very native american in their theology and beliefs and that aspect comes through loud and clear. Sadly, it’s just the “God is everything and whatever you call god is god” kind of feel-good bullshit. Nothing with actual epistemology. No bones to support things as it were.
The story itself was decent. Cowboys and Indians fighting off space marines and winning. Tragic losses, heroic sacrifices, battles, this story has it all.
Back in the 90’s the library only had this one book and it ended satisfactorily enough that my young self never felt the need to go out to a Barnes & Noble and search out the rest of the trilogy. To be perfectly honest, I could stop right now and call this a standalone and it would be A-OK. But I do have the rest of the trilogy and so I’ll be reading them. Of course, if the empty mumbo-jumbo shamanism gets too heavy, I might just call it a day. But I suspect Gear is a good writer and a story teller first and a preacher second. As it should be for fiction books.
★★★✬☆
From Wikipedia & Bookstooge.blog
Synopsis – Click to Open
The human race consists of billions of people spread throughout a relatively small area of space containing Earth and several other inhabited planets. The majority of the population lives on giant space stations, either in orbit or moving like giant ships. A change occurred over the generations that was caused by zero-gravity conditions and exposure to different radiations. Most are pale-skinned, thin and frail-boned; some would die if they experienced gravity. The human race is ruled over by the Directorate, a group of three genetically modified humans, through whom all information must pass before it is released; this has given the Directorate complete control over information for the last 600 years. They stopped all war and religion and caused humanity to be composed of mostly obedient cowards.
Before this 600-year period, the Soviets ruled humanity after conquering North America. The Native American tribes, angered that the position of reservations had not changed, fought back against the Soviets and succeeded, to the point that they were all loaded onto a giant prison ship and deported to deep space along with other rebels of Latino and Caucasian descent—a population of over 5,000 consisting entirely of people with the will and heritage to survive. The ship crashes onto a planet that they name World. 600 years later the survivors have mixed into many different clans that comprise two distinctly different and opposing peoples, the Spiders and the Santos. Their culture is mainly Native American with the addition of large bore rifles, hand-forged from metal of the wrecked prison ship and used to deal with beings they call “bears,” natural predators existing on World. The World bear is similar to a dragon-squid combination, having two spines that connect at the base and a tentacle on each side with suction cups on it that it shoots toward its prey.
The Directorate accidentally picks up a bit of radio chatter from World, as the warriors use hand radios. They send out the Patrol, a combination military/police force that, under the guidance of the Directorate, has had no violence or wars to quell in over 200 years. They arrive at World expecting to find civilized people barely surviving, as with most other lost stations or colonies. On the contrary, the native warriors are savage fighters following the Native American tradition of “coup” taking, or scalping killed enemies as a method of showing how many they had killed.
They then try to conquer the Romanans, as they take to calling the descendants of the crashed star ship the natives arrived in, the Nicholai Romanan, but find that these natives aren’t going down without a fight, as the Spiders, who believe Spider is the name of God and the Santos, a mix of Christian and Mexican beliefs, who call God Haysoos, are all about warfare and following what they interpret God is telling them what to do.
The Spiders and the Santos form an uneasy alliance and subvert the soldiers. They eventually take over a warship, and the prophet of the Spiders convinces the Top Directorate not to destroy their world. The Romanans survive but are irrevocably changed socially and culturally. The Directorate hires the Romanans as the last real warriors to fight a rebellion starting up in another star system.
