| See all titles by William Dietz. "A classic alien-invasion tale of survival and human triumph-great reading for anyone who loved Independence Day or The War of the Worlds." (Kevin J. Anderson, New York Times)
In For Those Who Fell, the sixth installment in William C. Dietz's Legion of the Damned saga (By Force of Arms, For More than Glory,
et al.), heroic soldiers like General William "Bill" Booly III and
Lieutenant Antonio Santana continue to fight for freedom against the
ever-opportunistic insectoid Ramanthians. The war with the
Ramanthians is supposedly over but as the Confederacy of Sentient
Beings searches for a new capital, the devious Ramanthians continue to
plot against the Confederacy by secretly dealing with the Thraki, a
neutral race of master engineers who are helping retrofit thousands of
military spacecraft for the Ramanthians -- for a considerable fee ("If
you scrape my chitin, I'll polish yours"). The Bugs have also just made
a momentous technological breakthrough by creating a hypercom:
faster-than-ship communication.
While Booly helps to stabilize the new Confederacy capital on the
planet Algeron, Santana is sent on an "off-the-cuff special ops
mission" to the remote planet of Savas to find and steal the hypercom.
Meanwhile, on the Ramanthian's Hive planet, the Queen is in the process
of creating millions of new insectoid soldiers.
With the hardcore military ambience of David Weber's Honor Harrington
saga and the sociological complexity of Alan Dean Foster's Commonwealth
novels, Dietz's Legion of the Damned series is so much more than the
sum of its parts. Fans of military science fiction who have yet to
experience Dietz's storytelling prowess should make it a point to do so
immediately. Are these novels first-rate military sci-fi? "Sir! Yes
Sir!" |
