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Sauron #2
EarthRise
An invasion by the alien Saurons has devastated Earth, until Jack Manning, Chief of Security of a government created to insure human cooperation with the conquerors, and Alex Franklin, the government's puppet president, join forces to undertake an underground war of resistance. Reprint.
432 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
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173 people want to read
About the author
William C. Dietz
126 books454 followersNew York Times bestselling author William C. Dietz has published more than fifty novels, some of which have been translated into German, Russian, and Japanese. He grew up in the Seattle area, served as a medic with the Navy and Marine Corps, graduated from the University of Washington, and has been employed as a surgical technician, college instructor, and television news writer, director and producer. Before becoming a full-time writer Dietz was director of public relations and marketing for an international telephone company. He and his wife live near Gig Harbor, Washington.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
September 20, 2020
What the hell was this book?
It's like Dietz entered a Write a Worse Novel than George R.R. Martin Contest and was like, "Oh yeah, I can do that."
This novel is insane, it is sub-pulp, it is Vogon poetry. Obviously there are reasons I object to this terrible book, so let's try to explain with minimal spoilers. Trust me none of what follows will ruin anything for you because this book is that unoriginal, but it will be detailed and maybe it will warn you off if you haven't already read it:
Choppy construction - The majority of the book is told in one page chapters, two pages if the words are long. These chapter breaks are ostensibly used to make you aware of a shift in the character focus, but more than once Dietz's ADHD chipmunk writing style jumps in the middle of a particularly long one-page chapter to someone else, doing something entirely unconnected and far away. But that was only five or six dozen times in the novel. I can't come up with a motive for this narrative hyperactivity except, possibly, Dietz was attempting to distract from how nothing in this book makes much sense.
Banal repetition - Plenty of authors take shortcuts when writing, and use tics as a way of baking the character into the reader's mind. Dietz does one better and repeats entire situations. por ejemplo consider this bit of business from p 25 of my edition:
Flat characters - This is one of those novels where every character speaks with the same voice, and they are uniformly heroic/depraved.
The names, oh god the names - Dietz has no talent for naming his characters, really. It takes far too much attention to keep track of them for the reward of knowing what they are doing. After all, they are all kind of indistinguishable from each other.
Bond Movie level villains - I don't mean the good villains like Auric Goldfinger, I mean Drax or Gustav Graves. There is nothing sincerely menacing about these BEMs (heh). Whatever awesome powers they possess or murderous talents are entirely undercut by the ease with which our small band of scrappy humans manage to not only survive, but out wit the very stupid bugs. Also, is it like a contractual requirement that every alien invader have an easy to exploit vulnerability that they lay open to humanity?
Crappy world building - Both alien species breathe oxygen and live in One-G environments, okay that makes sense given the reasons why they came to Earth. Thing is... well one species looks like a mantis, and the other looks and acts exactly like a sea otter with religion. Also, their social, their political, and their military and religious organizations are close analogues to human institutions. Their thinking and emotions are human-like too, and so are their aspirations and motives. And they can eat the same food, they emit pheromones, they fart, they have eyes, noses, mouths, arms, legs, fur, brains in their heads, they crap when they are afraid (like a lot, like too much), and their preferred form of execution is crucifixion.
The first all Black presidential team in American history - Dietz revels in this kind of stupid observation, which is bad enough, but then he also tries to inflect it with false tension by pretending that the outcome of this seriously over determined human versus alien war is in doubt. Oh my! will there be humans in the future to recognize this milestone? And this leads to my next two points:
Pointless patriotism and a facile racial subplot - The world was leveled by an alien invader and people continue to be blindly loyal to the destroyed federal government, except for the nimrods who think that this is a GREAT opportunity to establish a White nation. The racial aspect of this novel is enraging because it is so naive. It would help, just maybe if Dietz wasn't so obviously the kind of guy who would wonder why people were angered by his saying, "well yeah, but what I am saying is that all lives matter".
Other things to piss you off - Guatemala is NOT in the southern hemisphere as is asserted twice, and why describe the weapons used by the Rangers as old fashioned Native American long bows when you go on to describe a high end pulley assisted compound fiberglass hunting bow? Why is there a solar reflector satellite at one point but not another? And how about how about measurement? Turn out the one place where the aliens differ from humans is that every form of measurement is a 'unit', which is just phucking irritating in metric boot units. Units for distance, time, weight, and the volume of flour needed to bake a nice cake. And just when you accept that he throws in a measurement in feet, or hours, or quarts. Gads how that pissed me off.
Weapons fetishism - Dietz gives much more attention and page space to his treatment of weapons and their effects on bodies than he does to his characters. A common flaw to a certain kind of author. Bad ones. This authorial trait is almost always is tied to...
Sadism - There is a metric sh*t ton of ***"FUN"*** violence in this book. A lot of cruelty is expected in a book about evil aliens and a war, okay. What Dietz does though is revel in the blood, splash around in it, make the pain the point. Bad enough. Then he does what every hack author does when he really wants to shock us, and invites us into the room while a woman is sexually abused and tortured by some character he wants us to know is a bad guy. Then he doubles down by bringing a character who is nominally good (but even more importantly is female) in to discover the rape, has her describe it in detail, and then wants us to approve when the victim is mercy murdered by the heroine after she promises to kill the rapist.
Everything happens in the Greater Seattle Area -Okay, there are a few stupid side trips, but doesn't it seem weird that for a story of global conquest and subjugation that all the significant action takes place along the east shore of Puget Sound? And where the hell are the Canadians? And Dietz one of those authors who drops a couple of Spanish I words in his books so that we know we are in Guatemala. Anyone else remember Red Dawn? It's like that, a gang of scrappy kids from small town Wyoming topple Global Communism with squirrel rifles. It's deeply weird.
Love at First Sight - Dietz has either never been in love, or has no idea how to differentiate attraction separate from romantic love. The super hot beauty queen PhD was going to end up with someone by the end of this nonsense, figures Dietz hooked her up with el presidente since he didn't have a woman at his side. Don't even get me started on the Ivory family, and Mattingly and Sool, and so on and so on.
Okay, all that was terrible, really, and would have ranked this novel as one star all on it's own. But here is the thing that wins this novel a special one star all on its own:
Biologic impossibilities - How does a species survive that only reproduces once, and only has one offspring? How does it differentiate into multiple subspecies when every offspring is an exact copy of the parent? How does it evolve a requirement for a chemical additive to bring the nymph into viability? How do all but a few have the knowledge of this Birth/Death day? These critters are supposed to have the memories of their ancestors, but they haven't managed to recall this very important fact of life? and there is never a reason given for keeping it a secret, except... plot?
You would also think that a society with 1 to 1 reproduction would be careful of the lives of its members, but nope. They are casually killed and are a Warrior Breed, meaning they just die for fun? Also, why don't the Ewok Otters have mates? That was never explained at all.
This book was bad, and even more than it was bad it comes from a best selling author, which means he is another of those guys who cranks out gun humping macho man tales for short attention span readers. Nope. No more for me.
It's like Dietz entered a Write a Worse Novel than George R.R. Martin Contest and was like, "Oh yeah, I can do that."
This novel is insane, it is sub-pulp, it is Vogon poetry. Obviously there are reasons I object to this terrible book, so let's try to explain with minimal spoilers. Trust me none of what follows will ruin anything for you because this book is that unoriginal, but it will be detailed and maybe it will warn you off if you haven't already read it:
Choppy construction - The majority of the book is told in one page chapters, two pages if the words are long. These chapter breaks are ostensibly used to make you aware of a shift in the character focus, but more than once Dietz's ADHD chipmunk writing style jumps in the middle of a particularly long one-page chapter to someone else, doing something entirely unconnected and far away. But that was only five or six dozen times in the novel. I can't come up with a motive for this narrative hyperactivity except, possibly, Dietz was attempting to distract from how nothing in this book makes much sense.
Banal repetition - Plenty of authors take shortcuts when writing, and use tics as a way of baking the character into the reader's mind. Dietz does one better and repeats entire situations. por ejemplo consider this bit of business from p 25 of my edition:
Ivory tried to open his eyes, discovered they were glued shut, and struggled even harder.and compare it to this passage from p 134:
Jonathon Ivory awoke from a deep, nearly comalike, sleep and almost panicked when his eyelids refused to open. It was as if someone had glued them shut, and the racialist was pawing at them when he heard a stir [...].Please mind that Mr Ivory, the racialist, does not have his eyes glued shut in either passage. He may have conjunctivitis, but in neither section is this a meaningful bit of action. Also, isn't it weird to have a character 'struggle' to open their eye lids? Other portions of the novel have similar bits of meaningless business, and all of it is meaningless. All of it. Meaningless. And much of what isn't repeated is equally meaningless, most of the time the words mean nothing. There is a lengthy passage in the starting chapters where we are told that one character's dying words were significant in light of what came as a result of them. Nope. We never reference them again, and neither does anyone else in the book. Meaningless. Also, none of this is an original story. Can there be a more obvious retelling of the story of the Exodus than this novel? Plot: A high ranking official is a traitor to his own people, but returns to lead them to freedom. The have probably already signed CGI Ann Baxter to be the love interest in the film adaptation (see below). "Moses! Oh, Moses!"
Flat characters - This is one of those novels where every character speaks with the same voice, and they are uniformly heroic/depraved.
The names, oh god the names - Dietz has no talent for naming his characters, really. It takes far too much attention to keep track of them for the reward of knowing what they are doing. After all, they are all kind of indistinguishable from each other.
Bond Movie level villains - I don't mean the good villains like Auric Goldfinger, I mean Drax or Gustav Graves. There is nothing sincerely menacing about these BEMs (heh). Whatever awesome powers they possess or murderous talents are entirely undercut by the ease with which our small band of scrappy humans manage to not only survive, but out wit the very stupid bugs. Also, is it like a contractual requirement that every alien invader have an easy to exploit vulnerability that they lay open to humanity?
Crappy world building - Both alien species breathe oxygen and live in One-G environments, okay that makes sense given the reasons why they came to Earth. Thing is... well one species looks like a mantis, and the other looks and acts exactly like a sea otter with religion. Also, their social, their political, and their military and religious organizations are close analogues to human institutions. Their thinking and emotions are human-like too, and so are their aspirations and motives. And they can eat the same food, they emit pheromones, they fart, they have eyes, noses, mouths, arms, legs, fur, brains in their heads, they crap when they are afraid (like a lot, like too much), and their preferred form of execution is crucifixion.
The first all Black presidential team in American history - Dietz revels in this kind of stupid observation, which is bad enough, but then he also tries to inflect it with false tension by pretending that the outcome of this seriously over determined human versus alien war is in doubt. Oh my! will there be humans in the future to recognize this milestone? And this leads to my next two points:
Pointless patriotism and a facile racial subplot - The world was leveled by an alien invader and people continue to be blindly loyal to the destroyed federal government, except for the nimrods who think that this is a GREAT opportunity to establish a White nation. The racial aspect of this novel is enraging because it is so naive. It would help, just maybe if Dietz wasn't so obviously the kind of guy who would wonder why people were angered by his saying, "well yeah, but what I am saying is that all lives matter".
Other things to piss you off - Guatemala is NOT in the southern hemisphere as is asserted twice, and why describe the weapons used by the Rangers as old fashioned Native American long bows when you go on to describe a high end pulley assisted compound fiberglass hunting bow? Why is there a solar reflector satellite at one point but not another? And how about how about measurement? Turn out the one place where the aliens differ from humans is that every form of measurement is a 'unit', which is just phucking irritating in metric boot units. Units for distance, time, weight, and the volume of flour needed to bake a nice cake. And just when you accept that he throws in a measurement in feet, or hours, or quarts. Gads how that pissed me off.
Weapons fetishism - Dietz gives much more attention and page space to his treatment of weapons and their effects on bodies than he does to his characters. A common flaw to a certain kind of author. Bad ones. This authorial trait is almost always is tied to...
Sadism - There is a metric sh*t ton of ***"FUN"*** violence in this book. A lot of cruelty is expected in a book about evil aliens and a war, okay. What Dietz does though is revel in the blood, splash around in it, make the pain the point. Bad enough. Then he does what every hack author does when he really wants to shock us, and invites us into the room while a woman is sexually abused and tortured by some character he wants us to know is a bad guy. Then he doubles down by bringing a character who is nominally good (but even more importantly is female) in to discover the rape, has her describe it in detail, and then wants us to approve when the victim is mercy murdered by the heroine after she promises to kill the rapist.
Everything happens in the Greater Seattle Area -Okay, there are a few stupid side trips, but doesn't it seem weird that for a story of global conquest and subjugation that all the significant action takes place along the east shore of Puget Sound? And where the hell are the Canadians? And Dietz one of those authors who drops a couple of Spanish I words in his books so that we know we are in Guatemala. Anyone else remember Red Dawn? It's like that, a gang of scrappy kids from small town Wyoming topple Global Communism with squirrel rifles. It's deeply weird.
Love at First Sight - Dietz has either never been in love, or has no idea how to differentiate attraction separate from romantic love. The super hot beauty queen PhD was going to end up with someone by the end of this nonsense, figures Dietz hooked her up with el presidente since he didn't have a woman at his side. Don't even get me started on the Ivory family, and Mattingly and Sool, and so on and so on.
Okay, all that was terrible, really, and would have ranked this novel as one star all on it's own. But here is the thing that wins this novel a special one star all on its own:
Biologic impossibilities - How does a species survive that only reproduces once, and only has one offspring? How does it differentiate into multiple subspecies when every offspring is an exact copy of the parent? How does it evolve a requirement for a chemical additive to bring the nymph into viability? How do all but a few have the knowledge of this Birth/Death day? These critters are supposed to have the memories of their ancestors, but they haven't managed to recall this very important fact of life? and there is never a reason given for keeping it a secret, except... plot?
You would also think that a society with 1 to 1 reproduction would be careful of the lives of its members, but nope. They are casually killed and are a Warrior Breed, meaning they just die for fun? Also, why don't the Ewok Otters have mates? That was never explained at all.
This book was bad, and even more than it was bad it comes from a best selling author, which means he is another of those guys who cranks out gun humping macho man tales for short attention span readers. Nope. No more for me.
December 10, 2020
The planet Earth is in ruins following the Sauron invasion on Feb 28 2020. Whole cities are destroyed and most of the humans that survived are slaves to do the conqueror's bidding. The Saurons have installed Alex Franklin as their puppet president of the USA not knowing that he has joined with the resistance movement to find a way to destroy the invaders and rebuild the planet. The Saurons, a race divided into three castes, are pushing the human and Ra'Na slaves to rapidly build the citadels. The entire race will die giving birth to their hatchlings. Ra'Na and human resistance groups form to find a way of destroying the "master" race during the few days when the hatchlings are very vulnerable. Aliens and humans alike are willing to give their lives so that others may throw off the yoke of oppression.EARTHRISE, the sequel to DEATHDAY, is a fascinating invasion thriller. The tale enables readers to gain an intriguing look at the psychological and sociological essences of two alien races as well as the human reaction to a first encounter. William Dietz also profiles humanity and shows us as a race worth surviving for many of us are willing to die in the name of freedom. Overall, Though an insightful character and race study, the plot remains an action packed novel even as the charcaters feel as though they are part of our lives.
August 23, 2018
Dietz, William C. EarthRise. Sauron No. 2. Ace, 2003.
EarthRise completes the storyline started in Death Day. If Death Day was a response to Independence Day, EarthRise is a riff on War of the Worlds. The enslaved humans must overcome their own racist and xenophobic culture to discover the biological and social weaknesses of the enslaving aliens. The message is very much on the nose. The story has good action, and if you have read the first volume, you will no doubt want to read this one.
EarthRise completes the storyline started in Death Day. If Death Day was a response to Independence Day, EarthRise is a riff on War of the Worlds. The enslaved humans must overcome their own racist and xenophobic culture to discover the biological and social weaknesses of the enslaving aliens. The message is very much on the nose. The story has good action, and if you have read the first volume, you will no doubt want to read this one.
April 15, 2018
Much worse than the first. Celebrations of racism, genocide and other ugliness permeate this book and it doesn't really spend much time looking at the moral side of these issues. Small, furry aliens manage to save mankind against the giant, evil bugs. I'm sad I actually read this.
April 18, 2020
An action oriented novel with less stress on characterization as expected. But the pace and narrative speed carries this novel and makes it an exciting read nevertheless....
Too bad small furry aliens can't save us from this Covid 19 pandemic !!
Too bad small furry aliens can't save us from this Covid 19 pandemic !!
February 12, 2023
A little disappointing. Felt rushed at the end even though it took 2 volumes to tell the story.
Still, a different take on the alien invasion genre, so if you're into that it may be worth looking into.
Still, a different take on the alien invasion genre, so if you're into that it may be worth looking into.
Read
September 21, 2022The sequel to DearthDay - why?
September 24, 2022
Not a sequel. More like a continuation. Same racist aliens. More racist humans. Predictable outcome. Eagerly awaiting the sequel where a mysterious racist virus attacks Earth.
August 14, 2011
'Aliens Invade Earth' is probably one of the most prevalent story ideas in the history of science fiction. At this point in time, an author had better have some new twist to the subject and write it well in order to justify going down this well worn path. Unfortunately, Mr. Dietz's twist isn't good enough for me to recommend it to others.
Earthrise is the sequel to Deathday. I'd received Earthrise as a gift, discovered it was a sequel, and decided that I should see if I should buy the first book. Almost all of the reviews I read of both books rated them both at fair or poor. After reading a summary of Deathday I realized that I didn't need to read it before Earthrise. I picked up enough from the summary to know what the scene was: Earth had been invaded by insectoid aliens and was now enslaved.
Dietz's twist was that the insectoid aliens were racist. In their hierarchical society, black bugs ruled, brown bugs were warriors, and white bugs were slaves. As such, when the bugs enslaved humans, they categorized them that way as well. For example, the black governor of Washington state is picked by the bugs to be the US president.
So why did the bugs (who call themselves 'Saurons' - not too obvious that they're bad guys) invade Earth? They needed to reproduce. Apparently the entire species reproduces asexually at death, giving rise to a nymph that carries the genetic memory of its parent. It's an intriguing concept but every single bug all at the same time? That sounds far-fetched to me.
In Earthrise, the President leads a resistance movement to take back Earth at the point when the bugs are spawning their nymphs. The humans are aided by another slave race that the bugs have brought with them through space. They're called the Ra 'Na. Their physical description makes them sound like otters, but they're a technically adept race who know more about the functioning of the bugs' starships than they do.
So why the need for slaves? Well, the bugs have this millennial tradition of building great pyramids where the spawning is to take place. And tradition dictates that slaves have to haul large blocks of limestone into place, no superior technology allowed. Once the pyramids are built, the bugs plan on killing all but a handful of slaves, just to make sure that no one attempts to kill the nymphs while they're still vulnerable.
There are a lot of questions that I have regarding the bugs. Do they have an endoskeleton capable of supporting their massive exoskeletons? If not, why don't they collapse under their own weight? How did this spawning technique arise? And why only one nymph? If a whole species is spawning at once how did they come to their present size? Why weren't they eaten by predators on their homeworld millennia ago? Maybe the answers to these questions are in the first book.
As for writing style, Dietz jumps all over the place. One page you're in Washington state, the next you're in Guatemala, and then you're in space on the bug ships. And so many characters are introduced that few stand out. Just as one character starts to be developed, he/she disappears for 40 pages. The end result is that the characters seem like cardboard props on a cluttered stage.
I was leaning towards a 2 star rating but the ending was a letdown. I kept waiting for the book to build up to a climax but it never really happened. When it ended I actually said, 'That's it?!' The whole book reads like a series of events just strung together. There's no ebb and flow of drama. I never got the impression as I read certain events that they were pivotal moments in the book. It's only now that I've finished it that I can realize them for what they were. It was like driving over speed bumps when I should've felt like I needed to swerve to avoid fallen boulders on a mountain pass.
In summary, if you're looking for a good alien invasion story, pass on this one.
Earthrise is the sequel to Deathday. I'd received Earthrise as a gift, discovered it was a sequel, and decided that I should see if I should buy the first book. Almost all of the reviews I read of both books rated them both at fair or poor. After reading a summary of Deathday I realized that I didn't need to read it before Earthrise. I picked up enough from the summary to know what the scene was: Earth had been invaded by insectoid aliens and was now enslaved.
Dietz's twist was that the insectoid aliens were racist. In their hierarchical society, black bugs ruled, brown bugs were warriors, and white bugs were slaves. As such, when the bugs enslaved humans, they categorized them that way as well. For example, the black governor of Washington state is picked by the bugs to be the US president.
So why did the bugs (who call themselves 'Saurons' - not too obvious that they're bad guys) invade Earth? They needed to reproduce. Apparently the entire species reproduces asexually at death, giving rise to a nymph that carries the genetic memory of its parent. It's an intriguing concept but every single bug all at the same time? That sounds far-fetched to me.
In Earthrise, the President leads a resistance movement to take back Earth at the point when the bugs are spawning their nymphs. The humans are aided by another slave race that the bugs have brought with them through space. They're called the Ra 'Na. Their physical description makes them sound like otters, but they're a technically adept race who know more about the functioning of the bugs' starships than they do.
So why the need for slaves? Well, the bugs have this millennial tradition of building great pyramids where the spawning is to take place. And tradition dictates that slaves have to haul large blocks of limestone into place, no superior technology allowed. Once the pyramids are built, the bugs plan on killing all but a handful of slaves, just to make sure that no one attempts to kill the nymphs while they're still vulnerable.
There are a lot of questions that I have regarding the bugs. Do they have an endoskeleton capable of supporting their massive exoskeletons? If not, why don't they collapse under their own weight? How did this spawning technique arise? And why only one nymph? If a whole species is spawning at once how did they come to their present size? Why weren't they eaten by predators on their homeworld millennia ago? Maybe the answers to these questions are in the first book.
As for writing style, Dietz jumps all over the place. One page you're in Washington state, the next you're in Guatemala, and then you're in space on the bug ships. And so many characters are introduced that few stand out. Just as one character starts to be developed, he/she disappears for 40 pages. The end result is that the characters seem like cardboard props on a cluttered stage.
I was leaning towards a 2 star rating but the ending was a letdown. I kept waiting for the book to build up to a climax but it never really happened. When it ended I actually said, 'That's it?!' The whole book reads like a series of events just strung together. There's no ebb and flow of drama. I never got the impression as I read certain events that they were pivotal moments in the book. It's only now that I've finished it that I can realize them for what they were. It was like driving over speed bumps when I should've felt like I needed to swerve to avoid fallen boulders on a mountain pass.
In summary, if you're looking for a good alien invasion story, pass on this one.
July 31, 2015
This was a good finish to the duology. My mental image of the Ra'Na' (and I couldn't shake it, no matter how many times I read the author's description) was of an amphibian Ewok. Otherwise, despite the reader's shortcomings, an enjoyable finish to the series. I did feel that the ending was rather abrupt and short. Almost as if the author was tired of the story and just finished it in as few words as possible. I did like how Dietz closed the story lines of the major surviving characters. I even felt something for the losses of the neo-Nazi scum, which says something of the author's skill - enough to cause some empathy for a type of person that I loath. I would have liked to see some of the Ra'Na' stay on Earth, but certainly understand why the little furry aliens would rather return to their fabled home planet. I have read and will continue to read most of Dietz's books. I particularly enjoy Dietz's hard military SciFi with the Legion of the Damned.
July 30, 2008
The sequel to Death Day. The humans strike back.
December 3, 2009
I do like Dietz as an author, but wasn't intrigued enough in the first 50 pages to capture my attention so I actually gave up on this book and didn't finish.
April 6, 2013
This was better than the first book because it widened the characters out.
March 23, 2016
A good read but the ending lacked detail and was a little abrupt.
March 25, 2016
Drawing the story started in "Death Day" to a close. A little hard to have suspension of disbelief in some parts (are the aliens REALLY that arrogant/dumb?) but was still ultimately a fun read.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews