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
