Krishna
The narrator, William (Bill) Mandella, joins an army as a new recruit. He is taught eight silent ways to kill a person. They are at war with Taurans, who are aliens. It was snowing heavily and they were all frozen. Rogers was his ‘bedmate’.
Next day there was snow all over and they had to build a bridge in teams. Whichever team builds one first gets to go home for a break. The Tauran planet ws cold and so they were asked to train in snow.
The space travel was enabled by the discovery of the collapsar jump. Mandella and others were conscripted soldiers.
After a month of training, they are sent to the planet Charon. Which is very cold, near absolute zero. They are to train for a month and then will be sent to Stargate I through a collapsar. When their relief arrives, those who are still alive can go back to earth.
When they finally land on the planet, they confront Taurans. Also are followed by a teddy bear like animal – three legs and one ‘hand’.
They meet real Taurans and what follows is a slaughter, totally one sided, as the Taurans had no weapons except some ‘bubbles’ coming out of a flower like structure. And these were easy to dodge by just laying low.
When they deliberately capture one Tauran – humanoid but with weirdly thin hands and legs which are slippery and no neck or shoulders – he commits suicide rather then be captured so they are unable to take a live specimen back to earth for the xenolabs to analyze.
One of them managed to flee in a spaceship, carrying news of the slaughter and human weapons to their headquarters, probably.
The next time they met, it was nine years later for Taurans but because of the collapser, the ship had only experienced a few months. The Taurans had better missiles which increased speed as it came but all were destroyed. However, one portion of the ship was obliterated with no warning, nothing on the detectors – and thus unfit to fight any more. Ten people in that wing were instantly obliterated.
They are released into civilian life with the offer that should any of them opt to come back to the military, they have at least a Lieutenant’s rank available to them. Most do not want to take up the offer but Mandella finds that the earth he has come back to (25 years later due to the time jump) is a weird place. There is ration for food. The world over uses a single currency called Kilo Calories (the link with food intake is intentional) and there seems to be a weird government in place. Jobs are almost impossible to find. The pension he gets is not enough to live on.
The world meanwhile has gone into anarchy with ‘jumpers’ or thieves taking what they want and everyone able to go out in public only heavily armed or with a hired bodyguard. He meets with Marygay, a fellow army person with whom he is in love and when their parents who live in a commune are murdered, their worlds come crashing down even more.
When Marygay’s parents are killed in the peaceful commune by some anarchists, Mark takes her to his mother’s place, only to learn that she is in a lesbian relationship and anyway she dies because no medical facilities are available to those rated zero. The only way out seems to be to go back to the UNEF defence force from whence they came and get into an administrative position, far from the war.
You know, I think that it is a kind of a bleak novel in its way. Fighting aliens (Taurans or others) is a huge risk to your life and coming down to “peaceful earth” is laughable and also a huge risk to your life with an uncaring universal government of some sort.
They now face a Tauran attack of fairly sophisticated proportions. Let me digress a tiny bit here. The book reads like a standard sci fi story, with a few nice exceptions. The idea of going through collapsar jump is cute. And is the only way you can travel light years away if you still have to obey the law that no object can travel faster than the speed of light. The idea that you lose or gain a number of years is also very cute and “kind of logical” as relativity takes over at that time. At this point in the story, the elapsed time from the birth of William is something like 700 years!
However, to offset it, this one reads like vignettes. Every trip is different with different folks, different timelines etc. So you never get the impression that you are reading a single coherent story. To me, that is a very big negative.
There are compensating things, like what happens to not just the war but also to the world when they return some seven hundred years to the future, towards the end of the book.
But I was not blown away. Especially since space war or space opera is not my favourite genre. The very end – the last two pages – are extra nice.
5/10
— Krishna