David Drake comes through again with another excellent slammers story. The action is very realistic as are the characters response to war. Any war story fan should pick up this book (and all the slammers stories). These stories were written by a veteran of the Vietnam war and it shows. This book depicts a slammers infantry unit which is a bit unusual for the series. There are no supertanks demolishing things with their main guns. The action is more personal and on a smaller scale, but no less exciting or involving

Starts as a story of a Slammer unit composed of misfits, burn-outs and slackers, defending a much larger force that despises them as usual. However, the sneak attack by the enemy, is only the start of this unit's troubles. Forced to fight their way to the capital to prevent the government from falling, they must battle both the enemy and their treachous allies, all the time falling prey to their various weaknesses. However, once again, the Slammers prove that sick, weak and with little equipment, they're still the equal of any other force in known space!

Drake captures the spirit of the Odessey and retells this classic myth in a delightful setting, every bit as strange and facinating to its readers as anything that Homer came up with.

The PBS character Wishbone, takes classic stories and applies them to modern life. Drake takes a classic myth and applies it to the future with wonderful results.

If you want to sneak one of the classics into your teen's reading, this is the book to do it :-)

david drake is a master at the specialized form of military science fiction. this is one of his must read books. It is the continuation of hammers slammers and is about one soldier in that army and the taking of his proper place on the family throne.

Fireships appears to be the conclusion to the series started by Igniting the Reaches. But unfortunately, it did not have the flavor that one would expect from a Drake novel. I found it to be more a book written to reach closure, for both the series and for the author, instead of one designed specifically for entertainment value. Piet Ricimer and Stephen Gregg are old and familiar characters, and we get to see them again. But they've already progressed from being the new and inexperienced privateers we enjoyed reading about in Reaches, to men with wealth and comfort. Now the story revolves around them having to cope with the trauma of their travels, and their search to find their humanity again. If you enjoyed The Voyage or The Sharp End, you may find his book to be a slight disappointment. I found the moral issues in the book to be incomprehensible in a sense. Stephen Gregg is a tormented soul, but I don't believe the average reader can truly understand the level of pain that Drake is trying to portray. As a result, it takes away from the plot. My final recommendation is this: Should this novel interest you, read David Drake's afterward first, before reading the story. And do not expect a military thriller like we've grown to expect from this author.

I think this is one of the best works Drake has done. It explores war and its effects on the combatants to a degree rarely seen. It takes the series to an excellent conclusion and speaks volumes about what war will do the combatants. This book is raw and visceral at times, for most people it is as close as they will (hopefully) come to experience these things first hand. This book is one of the best if you suffer from PTSD from any cause. It helped me through some rough spots in my own life.

A light,easy on the mind yarn. A very good tale of overcoming the odds. Hawk and Ayla are very much alike, they both invent everything! Bow and arrows, spearthrowers, fire, tame a wolf/wild dog, ect..

Drake's working chapter titles included 'Giant Badger of Death' and 'Attack of the Marmont of Doom'. The book is Drake's fix-up from the late Kelgaard's work.

It's not a linear play in any way, not cohesive in a traditional sense. The scenes are not even comprised of sentences strung together but simply of words, images. The written text is proof that drama is meant to be performed. I know I'm missing something as I sit in the library and read along. On one hand, the play feels thin. On the other, we need a body on stage and its subsequent movements to fill in the gaps.

The anger surprised me, not that I didn't expect to see anger. I just did not expect to see it in the scene that describes why gay men go to the gym, which is to fight straights and be ready for "the day we bash the bashers back / into the graves they've dug for us" (p. 42).

Could the play be performed today and seen now as it was then? Since the last scene takes place on the last day of 1999--a time now in the past but in the future when Drake created the scene in 1992--it's hard to tell. Describing a world that has seen the Queer War of '96 and the assassination of Rush Limbaugh and imprisonment of Phyllis Schlafly and William Dannemeyer sounds hopeful in 1992 but more like a fairy tale in 2000.

Still, I have to appreciate someone who--like me--found solace in West Side Story and A Chorus Line. And who can write, "the truth will set you free. But first it will piss you off" (p. 86).

David Drake presents not just a play of incredible power and honesty, but a lyrical poem of universal truth and an insightful history lesson. No, this is not your typical Aristotelian drama, but that is partially why I love it so much; the other huge reason would be Drake's challenge to the complacency and the overwhelming lack of anger in the gay community. There's plenty to be angry about for anyone -- gay, straight and in-between -- and Drake presents his rage and his humanity in a form that is accessible, moving and real. This play is a gift to anyone who loves dramas that expand the realms of possibility or who have ever felt the activist spirit churning within.

This is Drake's latest Hammer's Slammers book. He does a pretty good job with it. Like many of his Slammer's books it seems to be composed of novellas. In this case it almost seems like three separate short stories that he either wrote as one larger story or wove together after the fact. He even repeats things in the second 'chapter' that seems to assume you didn't read the first. Overall it is an interesting story if not particularly deep. The focus is definitely on the action and not the politics in this one. The ending was a tad cheesy. If you like the Slammers you'll like this one as well.

David Drake's Paying The Piper presents a new 'Hammer's Slammers' novel centered around mercenaries and war. A young lieutenant finds himself in the middle of a hot war on an alien world in this story of war for pay.

This set of dark tales about a grim "detective" solving crimes in a bleak oppressive future is truly Drake's best work.
Lacey is a humorless, merciless "rehabilitated" rapist turned investigator who uses the all-seeing surveillance systems of the future to stalk his prey. Along the way he also gains some small measure of revenge against "Big Brother" for the mental emasculation that constituted his rehabilitation. It's too bad that none of Drake's other works come close to matching this level of intensity. Everything else I've read by Drake seems tepid and lame by comparison. Read it. Only 3 stars 'cause there are some really weak non-Lacey stories included to fluff up the word count.

Now this is a book of the distopian future, combine elements of Gunn With Occaisional Music, 1984, and A Clockwork Orange... Add one VERY hardboiled cop and you get one hell of a collection of stories. Drake combines historical events, a bleak future, and some bleak insights into humanity into an amazing journey. Not to be missed.

Drake tells us himself in the forward to this set of short stories that they were written in a dark period. Boy, I'll say! Lacy is totally ruthless. Drake does a fine job of inventing crimes in a near future where every action is recorded by the omnipresent camera. Lacey goes after his quarry with a bulldog-like determination that is riveting to read. Lacey is a semi-rehabilitated rapist made cop, who operates according to his own wierd moral sense. If you've read any of Andrew Vachs' Burke novels, you won't want to miss this. Oh yea, the, AND HIS FRIENDS, in the title refers to a couple of light fluff stories added at the end

Reprinted as "The Tank Lords" (see there) with a few extra bits thrown in. Reads easily, although I cannot help wondering how the regiment manages to survive, losing troops and material at such a prodiguous rate.

This is, in many ways, the best that David Drake has given us yet.

In a war not unlike the one in which Drake and i found ourselves a while back, an ad-hoc unit of odds and sods finds itself rolling hot to try to relieve their employer's provincial capital.

While these are members of Hammer's Slammers, the deadliest mercenary unit going, they are hardly the Slammers' finest, ranging from maintenance personnel pressed into service as the crew of a patched-up tank to their CO, Capt. Peggie Ranson, who is just this side of a Section 8, and a civilian reporter, who accidentally winds up along for the ride, who furnishes a viewpoint for the reader.

It is this viewpoint (one of several from which Drake tells the story) that makes this book, in my opinion, about Drake's best -- by giving us someone a lot like ourselves, putting us inside his head then and putting him through an accelerated version of the hardening process that produces a professional soldier from a raw replacement, Drake shows us even more starkly than usual, that war is, indeed hell. And why.

Drake is not going to let us get away from war without rubbing our noses in it; he wants the reader to see soldiers as *people*, not expendables, like bullets. He wants to show people who haven't Seen The Elephant what war is, and to -- just maybe -- convince a few of us that War Is Not A Good Thing.

Reading this book can be harrowing, as you watch men and women who are at least recogniseable and often sympathetic characters kill and die. If you can read it, watch those characters fighting and dieing, and not find yourself in some sort of emotional state as you read Chapter 13, which is a slightly-less-formal version of a military arrival report of Task Force Ranson's arrival in the capital, listing the few remaining vehicles and personnel that they rolled with, then you have Not Been Listening.

"...still i wonder why -- the worst of men must fight and the best of men must die..."

One of the absolutely most revealing looks at the military mind and what the military actually *DOES* that i have ever read.

I absolutely love David Drake's Hammer's Slammers series. It is military sci-fi with an edge so sharp no other writer comes close. With Rolling Hot, Drake almost outdoes even himself. It's the story of an ad-hoc unit of tankers and APCs that must make an epic cross-country journey to relieve their employer's besieged capital. The problem is, the Slammers troopers are in rest-and-refit for a reason; they're all either Section-8 material, green troops, or just plain used up.

As always, it's the characters that draw you into Drake's portayals of soldiers under fire. We follow events from the strangely detached POV of Captain Ranson, who must coldly proceed with her mission at all costs. A civilian reporter along for the ride provides the experience of a man who is at first ignorant of what war really is. By the end of the story, he's as hard-bitten as any Slammer. Equally gripping are the sub-plots incolving a new tank crew, a shell shocked veteran, and two maintenance workers pressed into service as tank crewmen.

The action starts up and doesn't stop til the very last page. I love Drake's ironic endings. The ending of Rolling Hot is bitter, but leaves you with a real sense of the futility of war.

It's been a long time since David Drake did any stories of Hammer's Slammers. I wish he'd write some more!

Too often I've picked up what looked like a good novel, and have been disappointed. I remember a WWII novel covered with rave reviews, but started off as pureil trash and went downhill.

I picked up "Oblique Approach" expecting a David Drake type SciFi quick read, shallow and fun. Much to my surprise this book turned out to be much more than its cover or authors would indicate. This may well have been Drake's way of saying that he can do better than potboilers. It may be that he and Eric Flint are natural collaborrators.

Whatever the reason, this is a book chuck full of history, geography, culture, combat, intrigue, complex characters and good old fashioned SciFi and a great read. My only gripe is that now that I've read the first book, I've got to read the series.

I can easily imagine how this series got started: a couple of guys musing, "I wonder what would have happened if an ancient general had access to modern weaponry and tactics..."

The result is an engaging look at an alternate reality where Belisarius, a real-life general of antiquity, is contacted by a sentient "jewel" from the future. It shows him a horrific future in which the Indian Malwa dynasty conquers the world for the forces of darkness, and he immediately enlists to stop them. He is given knowledge about gunpowder and modern weapons, and he sets about gathering allies for the war that only he can see coming. The action is almost nonstop as Belisarius journeys to India with new allies to learn about his enemy and help the oppressed Indians begin a revolution from within.

Detractors will point out that Drake has done this before with S.M. Stirling, and that is true, up to a point. One major difference, though, is the fact that the sentient gem in this series is not all-powerful from the start; it grows and learns throughout the book, gradually becoming more self-aware and developing a personality. Another aspect that makes this book stand out is the cast of characters. Many of them are familiar from history lessons, and all are individual and interesting. The interplay between strong characters keeps the book from becoming just a dry series of battles and strategies.

To sum up, this book has all the fighting action to satisfy a fan of military SF, combined with an intriguing premise. It is skillfully written, and I am eagerly awaiting future installments of the series.

I found AN OBLIQUE APPROACH to be intriguing, thought-provoking, and fun to read. History isn't my best subject, so I don't know anything about the historical basis of this book. But I trust David Drake, and I enjoyed Eric Flint's previous book, MOTHER OF DEMONS.

This isn't a fast-action book. This is a thinking book. Belisarius is a general with an excellent mind and the will to use it. Furthermore, Belisarius is not the only character in the book who can do something right. (I'm not crazy about "only you can save the world" books.) I also like the fact that he's devoted to his wife.