There's actually some pretty good ideas in here, but John Ringo often writes like he's some bizarre hybrid of a 13 year old boy and a puppy. Huh? Well it's like I'm watching some kid who just saw something really cool and drank three liters of jolt cola, and wants to show his slightly frightened friends and he's just bouncing off the walls and climbing the curtains as he tries to convey what's in his head. 

I'm trying to describe a sense of breathlessness in the writing tone and organization that is slightly annoying especially when coupled with an over assumption of close bosom familiarity with the reader. I just can't get as excited about the characters and dialogue as I think he hoped I'd be. Ringo writes this tale like a puppy dog that just wiggles and squirms around uncontrollably because it is so happy to just be where it is doing what it's doing. 

I think this is a very enthusiastically written book and I kind of want a magical editor to appear and help Mr. Ringo sand those jolly saccherine corners down a bit so the book is safe to handle. I am feeling a bit confused and crowded by a book trying THIS hard to be my new best friend for life just as soon as I picked it up.

I almost want to tell this book to calm down before it bounces out a window and hurst itself or breaks my book shelf. I bought a whole bunch of other Posleen/Aldinata books along with it, along with two other books, by the same author, about a giant space station called Troy, so I hope this wildly caffeinated energy in the book abates somewhat in those other books. 

At times the book is very technical and detailed. Ringo tries to bring across the rank structure, lingo, skills, techniques, and a few traditions, of the 87th Airborne, Air cavalry, and to a lesser extent the US marines. He uses a lot of acronyms and abbreviations and terms for formations or tasks. He tries to point out trouble in the chain of command and communication, bad intelligence, organizational weaknesses, rivalries, skill deficits, personality quirks and just how hard it can be to get along with a bunch of other people who you depend on for success and survival and what can happen when they screw up or hang you out to dry. the book is sometime s a bit dry, direct, and obvious about who is a fool, an asshole, a gem in the rough, an expert, a victim, or a super hero. the jerks rarely impress you and the awesome dudes never let you down and even when things go wrong they just get up and try to fix it. So the characters are a bit mechanical and 2D. Except when it's time for them to try to be funny. 

The books seems to want to focus the heroic ideal on the sweet spot where nerd, genius, and stubborn, meets reasonable tough guy who is nice enough to warn you twice before he feeds you a knuckle that you deserve and will help you grow as a human being. I'm not going to call Mary Sue but it does approach cartooniness at times and plot served mechanization at others. 

Often the text comes down to conversations that vary between angry grousing soldiers, to being preachy, to belting out fairly tinny pulpy serial fiction lines that get the job done, to describing a particular military organization, process or tactic, just trying to be wacky, or throwing out a bit of fan service. 

The variance in feel keeps the parts of the book from fitting together well. In some ways the novel occasionally seems like it might have started out as a collection of loosely connected different stories that fit together to describe a single over-lying fictional history event. 

Usually there is some point to almost everything in the book and the basic messaging is pretty up front.

The seemingly pacifistic aliens are untrustworthy but do actually need help and Earth really is doomed if we don't help. All the humans that can fight will need to including the old veterans who will be rejuvenated and put back in service. The war will be settled by separate countries acting as best they can in unison. The humans are expected to fight the war with unfamiliar technology developed very rapidly and not properly tested against the expected enemy. Their input is based on what they think they will need vs. what the aliens can actually build. The budget for the war is NOT unlimited. It is estimated that in the best scenario most of the human race will be killed and that the enemy will be able to grab and coasts and plains and that humans will need to withdraw to the mountains. Some humans will be taken off earth ahead of time to preserve a breeding population and sustain the species.

The humans are being set up, and the incompetence of certain characters is being ruthlessly exploited to cause a certain outcome to the fighting that is NOT in humanity's best interests. The federation see humans as almost as vicious and dangerous as the enemy they will fight and do not want vast numbers of humans with advanced technology with their own homeworld surviving the war. They want to use the humans as a weapon and then keep them around in limited numbers in case such a weapon is needed again in the future. They do not want humans uplifted and running free or being in position to challenge the federation's power structure. 

There is a theme to the book that cruelty, exploitation, bigotry, betrayal, bumbling, information management, espionage, stupidity, and toxic cultural institutions that keep everything as close as possible to a ruinous, stagnant status quo are a universal norm, even in a highly advanced "peaceful" and materially rich society. Creatures actively do what they can to keep each other down.  Specialization is portrayed as bad. If you do only one thing well then you MIGHT be replaced.  Beware the niche. Beware trust. 

I think there is a bit of a "yellow menace" type of xenophobic vibe to the aliens that seems to refer to caricatures of roles in our own society only magnified. I am not sure that there is an actual implied ethic/racial component to this but it sometimes feels like there is. 

Stereotypes have become species and it is not clear to me if the stereotypes are purely functionary and just feel uncomfortably familiar (like the various rabbit populations in WaterShip Down) or if they are more sinister and unfriendly and parts of a bigoted pastiche under a facade of science fiction. 

I would take John Ringo's word if he told me that there is no "there" there and I'm just being paranoid or over sensitive, but my hackles do raise a bit at certain parallels with xenophobic and racist propaganda. But I probably shouldn't take my hackles to seriously as that is quasi-mind reading more speculation than it is evidence of anything. And of course it could be there but he's going somewhere with it that isn't ultimately ugly. The resemblances between the races and specific ugly stereotypes might be a set up to stuff in further books that leads the reader to challenge the assumptions made by the reader and the characters and the aliens as things advance. At this point I just don't know. 

The Galactic  federation so far have stand-ins for feeble but arrogant detached intellectuals, researchers, and designers(the crab-like Tchptch), oppressed highly numerous but nearly powerless manual labor force ( the small timid teddy-bear like Inowy), cruel but non-violent financial/corporate task masters/negotiators/planners/  information managers (The long faced, elfin, and small but very strong fast and sharp teethed Darhel), and sneaky, cowardly spies/observers who see everything and are almost never seen (the front and back symmetrical two headed frog-like chamaeonic Himmet) and the AID(artificial Intelligence devices) that also seem to play a semi-conscious role of spy and assistant to the humans that brings them up to speed quickly with the new tech and clandestinely keeps the Darhel appraised of that the humans do and restricts their access to certain information. 

The Darhel want the humans to become the servile dependent fighters of this galactic federation culture and they want them to exist in limited numbers to keep them from growing powerful enough to effect change in the Federation. They don't care if Earth survives so long as humanity does and so long as a hell of a lot of the enemy die there fighting the humans. it is implied that the Darhel's nasty nature is part of their species and that an attempt to moderate it by some ancient power left them unable to kill anyone or even try to kill anyone or directly order someone to kill someone  without coming a vegetable. This does not stop them from carefully implying that they want someone killed and giving money to someone or something that does what they want. It does not stop them from giving advice that will cause people to get killed if they follow it. 

The Darhel are the background villains of the piece. They control the law and the economy of the Federation and to cross them is essentially to be frozen out of all future business and to potentially killed by some accident or seemingly random crime. 

Like the Posleen, (and the other races)  the Darhel probably can't really be anything different even if they wanted to. They like the other races of the Federation were altered by the long lost super-race the aldinata and those alterations have often been rather awful dooming the race to one role in the "peaceful" advanced federation. It is also implied that the Darhel know a lot about humanity and may have monkeyed around with human DNA at some point in the past enough to be able to provide human being with a host of useful and compatible super-drugs seemingly out of the blue. 

The Federation needs humans to be able to fight because the enemy Posleen are an omnivorous warrior culture that considers the other races (and their own kind it turns out) to be food. The Federation can only fight them with robotic weapons that tend to rebel and aren't that effective. The federation are really crap at direct warfare and many of them are entirely incapable of it. 

The Posleen are lizardlike centaur things that breed at an incredible rate. They eat their own kind and every one else's kind too. They move like a plague of locusts from world to world leaving only sterile radiation wastelands behind them. They have enough technological knowledge built into their genetic code to allow them to be born knowing how to produce energy and kinetic weapons, armored vehicles, monomolecular melee weapons, landing ships, armor, nukes, and star ships. They have obviously been modified to be a bioweapon by someone. They don't really talk to other species and just want to eat everything on a planet and move on. They are a high tech horde army that lives and dies on the go and expects to be eaten by their nearby fellows after they fall. 

They tend to fight with rudimentary tactics but are so numerous that it generally works. If their population  get too big they fight each other. If the population gets to small then they lack the numbers to get enough food to survive. Only one in hundreds is truly intelligent (despite the encoded tech knowledge) enough to lead the others, and these are called God Kings. The rest are only good for eating, building, fighting, and when they die BEING eaten. They apparently are so difficult to poison that   biowarfare and chemical warfare are useless against them. Mostly artillery and nukes work best and building barriers to temporarily their advance.The problem is that they can shoot missiles and bombers and such down. They don't seem to like cold or crossing water. 

They are the big dumb specialized monster enemy that the humans must learn to fight and defend the Earth and other Federation worlds from WHILE watching their backs for Darhel treachery or their own screw-ups. 

Anyway, that's that. I have about sixty pages to go.  

Next I will be reading either 'Remember Phlebas' by Iane Banks, 'The Dragon Never Sleeps' By Glen Cook, or 'A Fire Upon the Deep'  by Vernor Vinge.  

Or, I guess maybe I COULD read 'Zoe's Tale' which is sort of the other side of John Scalzi's  'The Last Colony'

Either way I'm probably going to need a break from the Aldinata stuff after I finish 'Hymn' up. 

I'm reading READY PLAYER ONE too, and am just over half way thru.

All of the 70s/80s pop references are pretty cute, designed to appeal to my demographic, tho not sure if it would get in the way of the story telling with a different audience. On the flip side of that, I find it similar to early books by Neal Stephenson or WIlliam Gibson where, in some cases, they were making up the references all together, and I didn't feel lost there.

How do you find it "fanfic"-y?

I dunno.  I'll certainly finish the book, but I think a little restraint could have been used.  My teenaged nieces and nephew barely know anything about the 80s and certainly wouldn't give up playing the latest Xbox game in favor of Joust!

Throughout the story Wade talks about how much time he spends on something like Joust, or any of a number of other games, because Halliday said he liked it and so therefore it might hold a clue. (I'm frankly surprised Cline hasn't brought up the Karate Kid aspect of this: repetition builds reflexes.) Referencing ads works too, in that respect, because he mentions that everyone watches what Halliday watched, looking for clues.

Fortunately for Cline, he set this all up at the beginning so it isn't coming from out of left field.