I read these three books, finished just before the trip, and thought I’d wait a few days for my thoughts to percolate. Interesting aside: though the cover credits them to Ian Douglas, this turns out to be a nom de plume for William Keith, who explains some of the publishing industry machinations in regards to pen names. Unfortunately he hasn’t updated the site in the last three or four years and following these convoluted trails on Amazon is not for me.
The trilogy is comprised of Semper Mars (1998), Luna Marine (1999) and Europa Strike (2000). The focus of the stories is a group of Marines as they defend American interests off-world after the discovery of ancient alien artifacts on, well, Mars, the Moon and Jupiter’s moon Europa from the years 2040 to 2067. Keith pulls together some interesting speculation (the so-called Face seen in fuzzy photos of the Martian surface turns out to be part of a huge, 500,000 year old alien colony), then intertwines some aspects of our past (the pyramids in Egypt turn out to be older than currently thought and part of a different, more recent visit by a different set of aliens) and mythology (these aliens portrayed themselves or were perceived by our ancestors to be gods).
Stack politics on top and you have some solid military SF. Keith definitely knows his marines, or at least he knows their ways better than I can dispute, and the political developments forty plus years in the future are not too improbable. If anything he was too conservative in projecting technological progress and, for instance, should have known better than to put specific details (such as quantity of memory and CPU speed in a PDA) in the pages. The books hang together well, I guess I’m saying, though the alien artifacts at the core of the last novel were a bit stranger than necessary; the ending seemed as if the author hoped to extend the series further as no conclusion to the underlying story was offered.
Recommended
A few minute later: Well, a quick trip to Amazon showed that, though Keith’s website has no mention, he has written a second trilogy that follows on to this one. Book One of the Legacy Trilogy is called Star Corps and was just published last year. Can’t find any mention of books two or three just yet.
BillSaysThis 