Live Free or Die

John Ringo is definitely a mixed blessing. On the one hand, you have a rather thrilling action scifi writer, on the other hand “Oh John Ringo No!”

Never let it be said that John Ringo ain’t a nerd. This book is basically a love letter to Schlock Mercenary, where right after a bad first contact puts Earth under the heel of not very bright imperialist aliens, an out of work scifi web comic author lucks his way into finding the single Earth product that actually sells off-world, and parlays that into bootstrapping an orbital military industrial complex.

The characterization is a lot of fun, if you can look past the frequent pointless jabs at liberals (really John Ringo, what did we ever do to you?), and I actually like the logistics of bootstrapping up past Kardashev Type I civilizations, but I’m not sure about Ringo’s space mirror array fetishism. Here, space mirrors are basically industrial and military magic that only humans have discovered in millennia of interstellar civilization. And there’s a battle, which we win due to petawatts of archimedean solar death rays, but the solar mirror fetishism is even less fun than David Weber’s missile salvo fetishism. Well, we’ll see where this goes.