I know these authors are award winners, but Novel Writing 101 teaches the need for falling action (denouement) when the loose threads are tied up. It's as if they didn't even really exist. But at the conclusion, we have no idea what becomes of them. These dozens of characters the reader spends hours getting to know and even care about. The aliens finally realize their cause is hopeless, and they surrender.
Then comes the climactic battle in space. Spoiler alert: For hundreds of pages, the book follows dozens of characters as the Earth is invaded by hostile aliens. But.in the it it JUST DOESN'T MATTER because the book just CUTS OFF. Some of the characters are really well done, and some are just one-dimensional caricatures. There are so many characters and their threads, both human and alien, that it becomes dizzying. But this book has such a GIGANTIC void that it ends up being a huge letdown. I don't read much science fiction, so maybe I'm missing something.
Save yourself some time and money and find a different book to read. No thought was put into the writing of this book. Not flash boiling of the sea water, not devastation or nuclear fallout. A few days later a giant meteor was dropped in the India Ocean, and yes, it caused wide spread flooding, but the only thing worse was that it rained for a week straight. Nuclear missiles were dropped on Kansas, and the only thing bad that happened was food couldn't be grown there. I tried to rationalize the fact that the book is old and was originally published in 1980, but the lack of common sense on the part of the writers is one of the main things that annoyed me. I finally finished it after 4 months of struggling to stay interested in it, and I now realize I wasted 4 months on a book that ended with a fizzle and not even remotely close to a bang. Once I made it half way through the book I made myself finish it in hopes that it would turn around and become exciting, but instead, it just got more and more ridiculous. So much time was spent just rambling about the clothes someone wore, or how they felt about a character that just didn't even matter to the story that I fell asleep reading this book more times than I could count. Instead, I got this book and read about small elephants with ridiculous names. I was looking for a good alien invasion book that told of the struggle between humans and aliens. This has to be one of the worst books I have every read.
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