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Thursday 26 January 2012

The Battle for Terra Two by Stephen Ames Berry


Wow, well that was an unexpected turn of events! There are four books in Ames Berry’s BioFab wars and as usual, numpty that I am I picked them up out of sequence and completely missed No 1! 

I started with the AI War, No 3 in the sequence missing out No 1 The BioFab War and this one, The Battle for Terra Two, the final novel in the quartet being The Final Assault....  The story does follow through in each book so, if you are going to pick them up for reading, can I suggest doing it in the correct order, it is less confusing that way.  Having said that it is less confusing, I still did enjoy the two books that I have read and so have immediately downloaded the last book in the series to my Kindle to finish them off!

As far as I can tell our earth is still stumbling along in a universe that has greatly outpaced us in evolvement and technology, which it seems to an extent we should be grateful for.

While we stumble along other humanoid races, such as the Kronarin and Utrians developed to an extent where they have engineered machines to do almost everything for them up to the point, where we get Terminatoresque Machines deciding that they can do things better than their human creators and spark a war.  It seems to have been complicated by a race of insectoid (Starship Trooperesque) life forms, known as Scotar, that can shape shift and teleport themselves in and out of situations.  A war rages across universes with whole star systems being laid waste and billions of lives lost.

These books follow the war through Commodore Detrelna and his Flag Captain Lawrona and the crew of the battle cruiser Implacable.  

The books were all originally written in the 80’s and reformatted for ebook in recent years, my biggest criticism is not with the stories although there are some small holes in them, but it is rather with the crossover formatting where words are misspelled.  There wasn’t that many to be honest, but you are in the middle of a gripping story and your eyes are racing over the words drinking it in and suddenly your brain disengages from the story to a typographical error and you go back to it to see if it was you or what you were reading that threw you off track.  Just a little disconcerting, and with a little more attention could have been avoided...


Detralna and Lawrona in Implacable are in orbit around Terra, Earth to you and I.  They learn from Guan-Sharick, one of the enemy insectoid, who appears to be ‘friendly’, that one of the Scotars, as the insects are called, has managed to travel to an alternate reality and is ‘growing’ a new breed of insect warriors who will come through a portal and the war will start again, this time with humanoids being completely destroyed.  Guan-Sharick goes on to inform them that the only way to prevent this, is for them to travel to the alternate reality and stop it from happening.


It turns out that in the alternate reality, America switched sides during the 2nd World War, to fight with Germany against Russia and Japan and that Russia and Germany are the ones who end up with nuclear weapons.  America is largely in ruins and while self governing, it is controlled by the Fourth Reich and under military rule with German Wermacht officers serving on US soil to help control the ‘Gangers’.  Cities are small enclaves of the chosen few, surrounded by gangs controlling the suburbs and fighting back.....  It is a fascinating concept.

The story follows the insertion of agents from ‘our’ reality into the alternate reality in a bid to track down and destroy the Scotar base while the Commodore on Implacable tries to find a way to get his battle cruiser to the alternate reality to make sure another stolen Battleship from his reality is taken out of play.........   It is fast paced from beginning to end and SyFy buffs will, I think love it.

 The Battle for Terra Two really does have an intriguing storyline and if I was Mr Ames Berry I would probably look at the whole thing with a view to developing a few stories based on the alternate reality as standalone novels, going back to that point in the war where everything changes.......
               Ratings:
               Editing for Kindle: 4 out of 5
               Reading Enjoyment: 5 out of 5  
   Plot: 4 out of 5
   Overall Story: 5 out of 5

Related Posts:  The AI War by Stephen Ames Berry 

5 comments:

  1. Interesting. Okay, so what is the order of books? Wait, I'll just head over to Amazon and check them out.

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  2. Stephen Ames Berry27 January 2012 at 00:55

    Thank you for a very thoughtful and uplifting review, Tom. I apologize for the typos. The series is due for a clean up and reformatting once THE BIOFAB WAR is published--hopefully this weekend. (Tom is also occassionally my secret proofreader. :) ) And the sequence of the books will be clearly indicated.

    I'll be packaging all four books in a omnibus edition and also publshing them as trade paperbacks via Amazon's Createspace--or rather, my staff will. :) Then, unless there's an outpouring of demand of the sort Conan Doyle received after sending Holmes over the Reichenbach Falls, on to new things.

    Thanks again.

    Cheers,

    Steve

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  3. Sounds good, Tom. I'm putting this series on my wish list. (The virtual TBR pile on my Kindle is spiraling out of control and I have to play catch-up before I download more crack, er, books to feed my habit.)

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  4. On my list as well. I'll watch for your new book and then I'll sequence away!

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  5. Thank you Julia, Jaye and Steve for stopping by and commenting.

    I have been reading The Final Assault since yesterday and am really enjoying that so will add a review for that too, especially now that I am clearer on what happened. I still admit to being a numpty....Oh, and you will be glad to know, very few finds, will email you when finished

    ReplyDelete

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