SF Book Reviews

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Vorpal Blade by John Ringo

Vorpal Blade is the second in John Ringo’s Looking Glass series.  It continues the battle between the human forces, and the Dreen.  The big change this time is we go from a battle and a big change on earth to a much more rote starship battling with occasional landings on various planets.

One of the things I really liked about the Looking Glass initially was that the concept was fairly fresh and enjoyable.  It wasn’t anything groundbreaking, but the idea that some kind of portal causes a nuclear level explosion in the middle of Florida and then causes portals to open up all over the planet and tons of different aliens to start pouring out is pretty cool.

This go around, we are once again given lots of very heavy nudges towards a conservative, militaristic viewpoint as always.  But this is pretty much par for the course in any John Ringo book.  Heck, after reading the first three books in his Ghost series, he goes positively light on his political agenda in this book.  Maybe someone else at BAEN is unenthusiastic about Mr. Ringo’s constant editorializing conservative winks.

Though I give this book a lot of flack, because essentially it’s pulp 101 story about drama on exploratory spaceship cruise across the galaxy, as always with Ringo’s book it’s a lot of fun.  Though I’ll bash it for it’s derivative nature, I also finished the book in one afternoon, and clocking in at 414 pages that’s still pretty fast, even for me.

Overall, if you have an afternoon to kill and want to give your brain cells a rest (and don’t mind a fair bit of conservative jibber jabber squeezed in there) you could do a lot worse than Vorpal Blade, or any of the Looking Glass series.

Rating: 6/10

Pros:

• Pageturner
• Interesting Locations
• Strong viewpoints that the author is not afraid to make you aware of!

Cons:

• Derivative
• Uneven Narrative Pace
• Never really goes anywhere.
• Strong viewpoints that the author is not afraid to make you aware of!