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steeluloid's review against another edition
5.0
Read this almost directly after finishing the first.
Not only a gripping story, but it has a lot to say about the way bureaucracy and woolly thinking are holding us back in the real world.
Not only a gripping story, but it has a lot to say about the way bureaucracy and woolly thinking are holding us back in the real world.
kennesaw59's review against another edition
4.0
Not as good as the first, but still interesting and does a great job setting up the third book.
bgmncwj's review
4.0
Interesting how this book didn't really follow the stories of the original characters that were in the first book. Instead it added a bunch of new characters and told the next part of the story from a slightly different perspective.
thiago's review against another edition
4.0
Great sequel. The first book showed capitalism saving Earth from an alien attack (TL;DR: sell maple syrup to other aliens, use the money to buy their technology and build defense systems). This second book shows capitalism+democracy saving Earth from another alien attack (e.g.: aliens kill our world leaders, hoping to cause wars of succession, and are utterly confused when succession happens peacefully and lawfully in most countries). Lots of fun and delightfully offensive passages (and blondes keep going into heat, thanks to that alien biological weapon from the first book). Also, this has to be the best military psych eval of all times:
"I've got a picture of your sister here", Mr. Monaghan said. "Cute. Clarissa, is it?"
"I've got a sister named Clarissa, Mr. Monaghan."
"So why'd you have a naked picture of her on your iPod, Butch? Don't you know that's child pornography."
"I don't have one, Mr. Monaghan," Butch said.
"Well, I'm looking at one," Mr. Monaghan said. "Cute. Nice little picture Nice girl. You think she's hot?"
"She's six, you sick bastard!" Butch said.
"She's six, Mr. Monaghan," Mr. Monaghan said.
"I've got a picture of your sister here", Mr. Monaghan said. "Cute. Clarissa, is it?"
"I've got a sister named Clarissa, Mr. Monaghan."
"So why'd you have a naked picture of her on your iPod, Butch? Don't you know that's child pornography."
"I don't have one, Mr. Monaghan," Butch said.
"Well, I'm looking at one," Mr. Monaghan said. "Cute. Nice little picture Nice girl. You think she's hot?"
"She's six, you sick bastard!" Butch said.
"She's six, Mr. Monaghan," Mr. Monaghan said.
mburnamfink's review against another edition
3.0
Citadel follows up Live Free Or Die with the basic outlines of the universe set up. Humanity is now a minor power, cut off from their galactic patrons by an expansionist empire. Now humanity has to race the clock to get their defenses up before a major invasion fleet comes through.
Our viewpoint characters are Butch, a space welder, and Dana, a shuttle pilot. These is a very guts eye look at mega-scale space construction, as they get the asteroid battlestation Troy turned into a warship. I'll admit, I cackled gleefully when they installed an Orion drive to send the Troy on offense in the final chapter. The bad aliens are delightfully hubristic, the tech big and glossy. Tyler Vernor shows up in a few places to play benevolent overlord, but this is at its heart a blue collar space action adventure.
That said, there's still a lot of Ringo weirdness. Not just the odd jabs at liberals, but stuff like a plague that makes blond women super fertile, or the "hard choice" to doom thousands of third-world contract employees to deaths in space because getting salvage in under the gun means cutting safety regs. And the basic problem of the setting, that Troy is so powerful that even kilometer-long dreadnoughts can barely scratch it, undercut the tension of the battles.
Our viewpoint characters are Butch, a space welder, and Dana, a shuttle pilot. These is a very guts eye look at mega-scale space construction, as they get the asteroid battlestation Troy turned into a warship. I'll admit, I cackled gleefully when they installed an Orion drive to send the Troy on offense in the final chapter. The bad aliens are delightfully hubristic, the tech big and glossy. Tyler Vernor shows up in a few places to play benevolent overlord, but this is at its heart a blue collar space action adventure.
That said, there's still a lot of Ringo weirdness. Not just the odd jabs at liberals, but stuff like a plague that makes blond women super fertile, or the "hard choice" to doom thousands of third-world contract employees to deaths in space because getting salvage in under the gun means cutting safety regs. And the basic problem of the setting, that Troy is so powerful that even kilometer-long dreadnoughts can barely scratch it, undercut the tension of the battles.
jtone's review
3.0
This is very much an old-school, John Campbell style, Terra uber alles type of book. It's a fun read, just don't expect anything profound.
alesia_charles's review against another edition
3.0
So I peered into the Bag o’ Library Books and noticed the new John Ringo that I’d passed up a few minutes before. I looked at my spouse: “You got the John Ringo?”
“Sure,” he said. “Why not?”
“I’ve read some of his stuff. It has … explosions.”
He laughed, and I laughed, and later on I read the book, because sometimes explosions are just what a person’s in the mood for.
Actually, you have to wait a while for the explosions in this one, but they do turn up. This book is a big chewy lump of Golden Age style military SF, with the added bonus of modern gender roles.
Squid-like hostile aliens? Check.
High-tech friendly/neutral aliens? Check. (I think these guys are furry, but I’m not sure; Ringo forgot to describe them for those of us arriving late to the party.)
Lizard-like hostile aliens? Check.
Key role played by a major techno-entrepreneur? Check.
U.S.A. leads the way? Check.
Major world cities bombed into oblivion? Check. (Actually, it seems that most of this happened in the first volume, called … wait for it … Live Free or Die, but there is some).
Imported alien technology including artificial gravity, working artificial intelligence, fabricators, and instantaneous travel-gates? Check, check, check, check.
Humans adapt to and improve on all this incredibly (from alien perspective) fast? Check.
Gigantic battle station built into an asteroid? Check.
Human society incomprehensible to aliens? Check.
Oh, and I almost forgot the huge solar mining/defense system. Heh.
Mostly, the story follows the rising careers of (1) a brand-new (and highly talented) female Navy engineer/pilot, and (2) a brand-new (and highly talented) male space construction worker. For plot-following purposes, there are jumps to the points of view of the lizardly aliens, the technological tycoon, and the President of the US.
If you’ve been reading SF for longer than five years, you have read this book before – possibly several times. This iteration is pretty fun, though. And there’s noticeably more room for characters in this one, than in some of Ringo’s other work that I’ve read.
I have one complaint about the worldbuilding, though. Apparently one of the things that happened during or before Live Free or Die was a series of plagues inflicted on the Earth by the enemy. One of them, either deliberately or as an unanticipated side effect, apparently has the effect of revving up female libido to at least equivalent to that of hormonally-afflicted teenage males. For some reason, it appears that birth control doesn’t work on them any more, either (unless that’s an oversight by the author … I don’t know, the explanation’s in the earlier book, it seems). This is seriously weird, and I’m baffled as to why the author thought it was a good idea. [ETA: Now that I've read Live Free or Die, it makes sense from the enemy's twisted point of view.]
ALSO, this affliction, and the resultant permanent state of pregnancy/childrearing, appears to be strongly biased toward blonde white women. So where, I want to know, are all the brown and black American women who would be moving into the vacuum? All we seem to see are white women who are “of course” pregnant, and white women who are in the military and have had the disease cured.
And why hasn’t the disease been cured across the whole population, I’d like to know? They can build all this marvelous tech but can’t clean up the genome of the population? Maybe that’s all in the first book, but it still doesn’t explain why after 17 years the Navy and civilian sides are not crammed with those black and brown women. [ETA: Yes, the shortage of cure is explained in the first book; they're working on it, but it takes time. Still no explanation for the main problem, though.]
But, that aside, it’s a good old-fashioned space navy romp, and there are non-white characters; just not any major point-of-view ones. And not enough female ones.
“Sure,” he said. “Why not?”
“I’ve read some of his stuff. It has … explosions.”
He laughed, and I laughed, and later on I read the book, because sometimes explosions are just what a person’s in the mood for.
Actually, you have to wait a while for the explosions in this one, but they do turn up. This book is a big chewy lump of Golden Age style military SF, with the added bonus of modern gender roles.
Squid-like hostile aliens? Check.
High-tech friendly/neutral aliens? Check. (I think these guys are furry, but I’m not sure; Ringo forgot to describe them for those of us arriving late to the party.)
Lizard-like hostile aliens? Check.
Key role played by a major techno-entrepreneur? Check.
U.S.A. leads the way? Check.
Major world cities bombed into oblivion? Check. (Actually, it seems that most of this happened in the first volume, called … wait for it … Live Free or Die, but there is some).
Imported alien technology including artificial gravity, working artificial intelligence, fabricators, and instantaneous travel-gates? Check, check, check, check.
Humans adapt to and improve on all this incredibly (from alien perspective) fast? Check.
Gigantic battle station built into an asteroid? Check.
Human society incomprehensible to aliens? Check.
Oh, and I almost forgot the huge solar mining/defense system. Heh.
Mostly, the story follows the rising careers of (1) a brand-new (and highly talented) female Navy engineer/pilot, and (2) a brand-new (and highly talented) male space construction worker. For plot-following purposes, there are jumps to the points of view of the lizardly aliens, the technological tycoon, and the President of the US.
If you’ve been reading SF for longer than five years, you have read this book before – possibly several times. This iteration is pretty fun, though. And there’s noticeably more room for characters in this one, than in some of Ringo’s other work that I’ve read.
I have one complaint about the worldbuilding, though. Apparently one of the things that happened during or before Live Free or Die was a series of plagues inflicted on the Earth by the enemy. One of them, either deliberately or as an unanticipated side effect, apparently has the effect of revving up female libido to at least equivalent to that of hormonally-afflicted teenage males. For some reason, it appears that birth control doesn’t work on them any more, either (unless that’s an oversight by the author … I don’t know, the explanation’s in the earlier book, it seems). This is seriously weird, and I’m baffled as to why the author thought it was a good idea. [ETA: Now that I've read Live Free or Die, it makes sense from the enemy's twisted point of view.]
ALSO, this affliction, and the resultant permanent state of pregnancy/childrearing, appears to be strongly biased toward blonde white women. So where, I want to know, are all the brown and black American women who would be moving into the vacuum? All we seem to see are white women who are “of course” pregnant, and white women who are in the military and have had the disease cured.
And why hasn’t the disease been cured across the whole population, I’d like to know? They can build all this marvelous tech but can’t clean up the genome of the population? Maybe that’s all in the first book, but it still doesn’t explain why after 17 years the Navy and civilian sides are not crammed with those black and brown women. [ETA: Yes, the shortage of cure is explained in the first book; they're working on it, but it takes time. Still no explanation for the main problem, though.]
But, that aside, it’s a good old-fashioned space navy romp, and there are non-white characters; just not any major point-of-view ones. And not enough female ones.
zivan's review
4.0
In Citadel Ringo takes us down from the executive level to the grunt level.
This is very good as Live Free or Die turned into a long executive meeting towards the end.
The right wing politics are still here, and they can be irritating because there is a clear ideology that is in the right and others that are set up as straw men to be wrong.
Tyler Vernon reminds me of the heiress in [a:Peter F. Hamilton|25375|Peter F. Hamilton|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1235123752p2/25375.jpg]'s Greg Mandel books, where a benevolent super rich industrialist guides humanity towards a brighter future.
Things are going well only because the author made the super rich king of tech a benevolent father figure. He could just as well have been a murderous psychopath.
In any case, Citadel is a fun read, about a humanity fighting for it's life in a hostile universe and winning. I'm enjoying myself and will continue to the next book the the trilogy.
This is very good as Live Free or Die turned into a long executive meeting towards the end.
The right wing politics are still here, and they can be irritating because there is a clear ideology that is in the right and others that are set up as straw men to be wrong.
Tyler Vernon reminds me of the heiress in [a:Peter F. Hamilton|25375|Peter F. Hamilton|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1235123752p2/25375.jpg]'s Greg Mandel books, where a benevolent super rich industrialist guides humanity towards a brighter future.
Things are going well only because the author made the super rich king of tech a benevolent father figure. He could just as well have been a murderous psychopath.
In any case, Citadel is a fun read, about a humanity fighting for it's life in a hostile universe and winning. I'm enjoying myself and will continue to the next book the the trilogy.
joelmeador's review
2.0
The science in the science fiction was less present and less interesting than the first book, and the character focus was different. If you love American exceptionalism taken to a galactic scale, here is a book you can read. Also space battles pew pew.
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