By Blood Alone
Author: William C. Dietz
Year: 1999
Abstract:
Several problems face the Legionares of Earth's famous fighting
force. A militant faction takes over the Earth government, sending troops
across the globe at each other's throats. A strange race of machines is bent
on genocide, and a once mighty empire of fearsome warriors are plotting a
return to power. Colonel Bill Booley and his Legionares are all that stand
between peace and galactic war!
| Advanced Mind | |
| Exploration/Quest |  |
| Military/Fighting | |
| Horror | |
| Magic | |
| Advanced Technology | |
| Time Travel/Alternate History | |
| Science | |
| Aliens/Beasties | |
| Contemporality |
Other books in this series: Legion of the Damned
Legion of the Damned [1993]
The Final Battle [1995]
Spectre's Review
I really liked this one. Dietz has built a universe full of funky aliens
that interact realistically with humanity. I appreciated his alien race
names, not too weird or hard to pronounce (few things annoy me more than
hard to pronounce worthless strings of text indicating an alien race).
Character generation was very well done, and I was disappointed when a couple main characters were killed. I was also very well pleased when a couple other main characters were killed.
I'm a bit of a stickler on technique, sometimes, and Dietz did a very good job on most of the seemingly random criteria I pay attention to at any one time. This whole series would probably be quite fascinating.
I was disappointed in a couple of scenes, where there was some completely worthless sex thrown in. I also felt Jepp's scenes didn't seem to fit quite right. Even with the understanding that this was supposed to set up the Sheen invasion.
2 rockets for the quests by Jepp, Sola, and the Sheen. The whole book was nothing but fighting, so 10 rockets there. Lot's of cool new technology and science, so 7 and 4 rockets respectively. Very well done alien races, but it wasn't quite a bug hunt, so 7 rockets on aliens/beasties.
Date posted: 2002 02 14
Spectre's Rating
Minus one for a couple of unnecessary sex scenes. Minus one for poor
handling of a sub-plot.