I feel the need to warn my friends and collegues away from a book I just finished. David Weber’s Out of the Dark.
Standard alien invasion, outdated survery data, they are expecting crossbows and swords and are met with tanks and fighter jets. Shit blows up real good. Plucky humans fight them until the aliens are desperate enough to start engineering a bioweapon to kill us all.
Then, when all is darkest in the last sixty pages, Count Dracula and his team of vampire commandos infiltrate the alien bases, take over their starships, and save the day.
Really. Vlad Drakul himself. I don’t want that to be in a spoiler box, I feel it is my duty to warn everyone about this book. There is no foreshadowing at all to imply that this is a world which includes vampires. There are no hints that we can say “Oh, that’s what [page 47] meant! Of course! How clever!”
No, this is just the most blatant deau ex machina ending I have come across in years.
I don’t often accuse a writer of cheating, but Weber actually pissed me off with this book.
Exactly. Especially as we go through 300-some-odd pages of human resistance fighters with nary a vampire in sight. Except that the Romanian leader of the resistance movement (who shows up more than half-way through the book) turns out to be Dracula. But he doesn’t avoid sunlight, he has no aversion to garlic, and the abilities he displays in the last chapter are exactly consistent with the B-movie vampire mythos.
Now, if one character ever asked “Why don’t I ever meet him during the day?” or a “How did he get into that bunker?” or “Those bullets sure look like they hit him, but it must have been an lucky near miss” I would be more accepting.
Agreed - the book was fun with the resistance style stuff. It feels like he wrote 2/3 of a good resistance book, realized that he would need to have some way to hand-wave the risk of the aliens just saying “screw it, nuke 'em from orbit.”
Then he remembered his unfinished short story of Dracula fighting off an alien invasion and glued it together.
Reminds me of an old horror comic that had an alien ship abducting a cowboy in the 1800’s. Cowboy ends up killing shitloads of aliens, repeatedly escaping capture, and finally, tearing aliens apart with his bare hands. They hustle him off the ship, set out orbiting buoys to stay the fuck away from this planet if you value your space-nuts, and warp away to recover from the ass-beating.
Final page of the comic book is the cowboy wandering over the plains at night and finally climbing back into his coffin before the sun rises.
I decided I needed a new genre term midway through that book: ordinance porn. He spent a lot more time lovingly detailing the weaponry and ammunition and so forth used–its exact size, its chemical composition, its speed, its explosive power–than he spent making me give a shit about any of the characters. Every time a new gun showed up, you could hear the bow-chicka-wow-wow.
So when Dracula saved the day, I burst out laughing. The book went from merely terrible to truly campy.
And this is different than any other Weber book how?
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve probably read 95% of his books, multiple times, but you can skip about 50% of the pagecount and not miss a bit of plot once you learn his cues for ‘tech/political info dump coming’.
