Akiva Reads

by Christopher Anvil

Bad. Baaaad. I haven't finished reading it, but all the enjoyment has been wrung out and stomped to death by now, so I probably won't.

The first few chapters are the aliens sitting around and recounting how they finally have Earth under control---sort of---and trying to solve the remaining tactical and political problems. This part is actually pretty entertaining, even though it's all tell and no show. Plucky Earthlings making trouble! Beleaguered bureaucrats! Yay! Finally, they get the wise idea to incorporate Earth into the rest of the interstellar society through reverse psychology, so that's all right then.

More or less instantly, we introduce what's-his-face, alias Able Hunter, an Earth general who chafes under his superiors and will be joining the alien forces as a guerilla-tactics problem solver. What is this guy's deal? The Earth insurrection hasn't been dead for more than a paragraph and he's already signing up to subdue other alien civilizations for the enemy? The other mystery about Able Hunter is that he didn't wash out of the military 30 years ago. He has an intense antipathy for authority, plus a passive-aggressive streak a mile wide.

All of AH's chapters are studies of tactics in various situations, and I don't particularly enjoy sitting around trying to figure out what the fuck the author is trying to describe and why I should think it's clever. YMMV. But what really killed the novel for me was two chapters I hated, one right after the other:

One chapter in which the two alien generals scope out a planet newly "conquered" by human culture. Turns out that everyone on welfare is a malingerer defrauding the system. Okay. Our "heroes" get into trouble and are taken in by a priest with road rage. Although I don't think road rage accurately conveys that this guy has an indestructible carnivore for a carthorse which can be released from its traces to destroy other cars and kill all their occupants at the touch of a button. (I think this is supposed to be funny.) By the way, he's a priest. I don't even. I can't even.

The other chapter in which Able Hunter lands on a planet full of stupid savages who don't know they're defeated and keep attacking the invading force, which is a downer for the soldiers who have to kill them. If all that wasn't disturbing enough on its own, this is also where we get the full blast of how AH deals with hierarchy. Again, I think I was supposed to find it funny, but all I got out of it was that AH is an asshole.

If all that wasn't enough, I'm at 36% in and I have never read a book with fewer female characters. There are literally none. Not even off-screen mentions of wives or mothers. I thought for a moment that one of the nameless cameo scientists had been referred to with female pronouns, but it turned out I was hallucinating. In fact, I just took advantage of technology to do a search for the words "she" and "her." What I got: a paraphrase of the "Pandora's Box" myth, a bus, a statue in a fountain, and a planet. Nice.

I got it for free from Baen as an e-book, so.