Surface Action

by David Drake

Earth has been destroyed by the nuclear folly of her children, and mankind's remnant now lives in dome-enclosed colonies on Venus. Will history repeat itself as warring factions threaten to... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 044136375X
• ISBN13: 9780441363759
• Release Date: October 1990
• Publisher: Ace Books
• Length: 236 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Free SF Reader

A young man, who father is a senior politician in one of the Domed cities of Venus is recruited by his uncle, a commander in one of the free mercenary companies that operation on the surface, and seas. He wants someone he can trust completely for an upcoming city vs city minor war. One of the other senior officers completely opposes this commander, and gets this company suckered. This leaves them on a desperate mission to steal a capital ship and try and lure their opponents, who outnumber them heavily, into a trap. Pretty reasonable story - and as I suspected, it is deliberately a homage to Henry Kuttner's Clash by Night, for those that like that. The lengthy tours of naval military hardware will get tedious for some, although generally it makes sense where done. 3.5 out of 5

Don't hate the novel, hate the genre

Ye Gods, what got into the anonymous Publishers Weekly reviewer above? Surface Action was written within a genre that relies more on archetypal characters than rich Faulknerian constructions, where depictions of military action take the place of intricate Tolstoyan plotting. If this sounds unappetizing, well there's no shortage of other things to read. But the fact that you're reading this review probably means that you're unperturbed by the fact that this book isn't a profound meditation on War and Man. I frankly doubt the above reviewer would have much good to say about the entire genre this book resides in. Surface Action's merits are these: it depicts - fairly creatively - a futuristic Venus populated by all manners of frightful beasties, and it features pretty decent naval action. It's short, fast-paced, has some decent plot twists, and is full of action - it's the kind of thing you could polish off in an evening, without the self-important meditation that seems to have peeved our above reviewer so much. Drake, a Vietnam veteran, knows what he's writing about when depicting combat; and he does humanize the action when he can. In short, this is quick clean fun, and a good bargain at its present price.