Shiva Option

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
David Weber and Steve White's popular Starfire military science fiction series (Insurrection, Crusade, and In Death Ground), which takes place in the Starfire role-playing game universe, continues in The Shiva Option.

After the events of Operation Pesthouse, the "most overwhelming disaster in the history of the Terran Federation Navy," humankind and its alien allies must regroup to fight the carnivorous Arachnids, seemingly unstoppable invaders bent on galactic domination -- and consumption.

The Arachnids (more commonly referred to as Bugs) are easy to hate. Reminiscent of Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Trooper insectoid antagonists, they are relentless, merciless killing machines. "The radially symmetrical being bore neither relation nor resemblance to any Terran lifeform. But the six upward-angled limbs surrounding and supporting the central pod, the whole covered with coarse black hair, made it easy to see why the term 'arachnid' had been applied. Those limbs rose to pronounced 'knuckles' well above the central pod before angling downward once more, and two other limbs ended in 'hands' of four mutually opposable 'fingers' while above the eight limbs were eight stalked eyes, evenly spaced around the pod's circumference. And if all that hadn't been sufficient to show that this thing had evolved from nothing that ever lived on Old Terra, there was the mouth -- a wide gash low in the body-pod, filled with lampreylike rows of teeth and lined with wiggling tentacles. Everyone present knew what those tentacles were for: to hold living prey immobilized for ingestion."

In this, the Fourth Interstellar War, humankind has joined together in a Grand Alliance with several other alien races (including the catlike Orions) in a desperate attempt to defeat the swarming Arachnids once and for all. Together, the races try to figure out a way to stop wave after wave of attacking Bug spacecraft armed to the teeth with antimatter missiles and warheads.

But when the Federation Fleet finds one of the Arachnids' home worlds (Home Hive Three) and destroys it using overwhelming force and the element of surprise, a flaw in the Bugs' defense is discovered. When thousands of "civilian" Bugs are killed en masse, their communication system throughout the whole system is temporarily slowed and the ships are aimless without instructions. But with the Bugs' superior numbers and very quick learning curve, will the Alliance be able to capitalize on this weakness?

Long forgotten in the epic galactic war is Fleet Survey Flotilla 19, believed destroyed in Operation Pesthouse years earlier. Rear Admiral Aileen Sommers and the rest of her crew have been missing for five and a half years. After fleeing through a warp point into the unknown, the humans thought they were safe. But the Bugs tracked the fleet down and were in the process of wiping them out when they were attacked and destroyed by a mysterious force -- a new alien race with new technology! Will Sommers and her new friends (the Star Union of Crucis) be able to get back in time to help the Alliance before the Bugs defeat them?

The role-playing game origins of this series are evident in this novel. The Starfire universe is filled with warp points -- shortcuts to other systems -- which make military strategies even more complex. The discovery of a warp point into the Bugs' Home Hive One, for instance, is a huge break for the Alliance -- that is, if it isn't another trap.

Hard-core military science fiction fans will thoroughly enjoy this series: There's literally nonstop action, great subplots involving the tenuous relationships between humans and other races in the Grand Alliance, and an enemy that you can't help but despise. (Paul Goat Allen)

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The war wasn't going well.

The mind-numbingly alien Arachnids were an enemy whose like no civilized race had ever confronted. Like some carnivorous cancer, the "Bugs" had overrun planet after planet . . . and they regarded any competing sentient species as only one more protein source. They couldn't be reasoned with, or even talked to, because no one had the least idea of how to communicate with a telepathic species with no recognizable language...and whose response to any communication attempt was a missile salvo. No one knew how large their civilization - if it could be called a "civilization"- actually was, or how it was organized, but the huge fleets they threw against their opponents suggested that it was enormous.

The Grand Alliance of Humans, Orions, Ophiuchi, and Gorm, united in desperate self-defense, have been driven to the wall. Billions of their civilians have been slaughtered. Their most powerful offensive operation has ended in shattering defeat and the deaths of their most experienced and revered military commanders. The edge in technology with which they began the war is eroding out from under them and whatever they do, the Bugs just keep coming.

But the warriors of the Grand Alliance know what stands behind them and they will surrender no more civilians to the oncoming juggernaut. They will die first...and they will also reactivate General Directive 18, however horrible it may be. Because when the only possible outcomes are victory or racial extermination, only one option is acceptable.

The Shiva Option.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Fans of space opera who have been eagerly awaiting this sequel to Weber and White's In Death Ground (1997) won't be disappointed, to put it mildly. Humanity and its various allies find themselves under attack by an enemy with whom no communication, let alone coexistence, is possible, since their foes lack individual sentience and are driven by a Darwinian imperative to regard all other life forms as food sources. Countered against this nightmare are an assortment of diverse species, some unknown to one another, who share the ability to make moral choices, "including the ultimate choice of sacrificing that very individual consciousness in the name of what all of us recognize, in one form or another, for what it is: honor." This capacity is stretched when it is discovered that, in this war, genocide is a tactical weapon. The authors have created a fictional reality with all of the verisimilitude of a technothriller, but this doesn't credit them enough, since unlike, say, Tom Clancy, they have had to create their own weapons, tactics and even societies. Characterizations are strong and vivid, particularly the Human and Orion command team that spearheads the fight and a fighter pilot who's haunted by the ghosts of her dead. Ultimately, Weber and White have written an exposition, in the form of a novel, of Heinlein's axiom that "ethics are a survival mechanism," leaving the reader both exhilarated and enriched. (Feb.) FYI: Weber is the author most recently of The Excalibur Alternative (Forecasts, Nov. 19). Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

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