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Avg. Rating: 4
Worth reading
Not at all what I thought it would be when I started reading it. While I did skim from time to time it was never for more than half a page. I just couldn't bring myself to care at all what the bad guys did or said.
I recommend this book but hope there are no sequals as I think they'd stink.
Gods meet Spacemen with unpredictable results
Steve White started his writing career with Dave Weber writing books set in the Universe of the Starfire space wargames but his writing has tremendously broadened and improved since then and this is one of his best books to date.
This is one of the few books which are hard to categorise as between science fiction and fantasy. Most science fiction books and most fantasy books are so different that the tendancy of publishers and bookstores to lump them in one category is downright irritating, but this is one of those which features Gods and Spacemen and still somehow manages to hang together.
The plot is quite gripping and easy to follow. As in most of White's books, some of the bad guys do truly evil things which means the tone of the book gets a bit dark in places, but there are some good flashes of humour which lighten it up a bit.
Bottom line, if you liked any of Steve White's other books you will almost certainly like this one. It is also a bit like Piers Anthony's "Incarnations of Immortality" series, or like some of C.S. Lewis's more adult works such as the Ransom trilogy, although not so firmly rooted in one particular religious view.
One warning to anyone tempted to buy the book on the basis of the cover art, which shows a beautiful woman fleeing from spacesuited figures through a mysterious portal onto a sea shore. This scene does actually appear in the book, but in the text the woman is wearing a checked shirt, jeans and sneakers, while in the cover illustration all her clothes have mysteriously disappeared.
This is the type of SF novel I try to avoid
"Forge of the Titans" starts out promisingly. It has an interesting lead character, Derek Secrest, who is pulled out of Naval flight officer training school a week before his graduation, in order to participate in a top secret government project.Navy slang and acronyms lent verisimilitude to the book's first thirty or so pages, and Derek's disappointment in missing his graduation drew my sympathy. The top secret project involving psionic powers has been done many times, but I was willing to follow Derek on his reluctant journey to develop his telepathic talent. I liked the setting, his friends, and even some of the characters who were lifted right out of the SF bible of stock players, such as the humorless but brilliant female scientist. Derek is ordered to track down a terrorist and determine what he plans to do with a supply of deadly nerve gas. Okay. Fine. That sounds like a practical military application for telepathy. Derek reads his terrorist's mind prevents the release of the nerve gas, but then all sorts of plot devices begin hitting the fan. Goddesses, Titans, and assorted aliens from outer space show up who have nothing to do with the original terrorist plot. Derek and his friends take a space plane into orbit and are kidnapped by the aliens, who turn out to be humans who have developed a superior technology based on magic. "Forge of the Titans" then descends into techno-babble. Normally, I like a book with snappy dialogue, even when I'm being fed all sorts of pseudo-science (or maybe I should say futuristic science---Heinlein did this so very well without stalling his plot or lessening my attraction to his characters). But I really lost interest when the author began to crank out reams of sentences like: "Soon, the remaining antimatter missles were being launched at 'sprint' ranges, making interdiction difficult even for point-defense lasers." The book turned into a sort of "Psionic Hercules versus the Titans in Outer Space." Finally, my favorite character is killed off in what seems like a feeble bid for reader sympathy, but he dies so stupidly it simply ended up annoying me. I don't think I'll bother with the inevitable sequel.
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