The Shiva Option / David Weber and Steve White

OK, at some level, it's just a boring book, a disappointing finish to a series. The earlier books set in this universe ( Insurrection, In Death Ground) were satisfying pulp paperbacks.

On another level, it's a horrifying novel about self-righteous genocide. (Well, xenocide.) There's no question that the Bugs in this universe are evil creatures. They use themselves as kamikazes with horrible abandon, as a matter of basic strategy. They use other sentient species for food. And, as we learn in this book, they're kind of a collectivist telepathic community. Evil? Sure. Available for redemption or rehabilitation? Who knows? No one in the book even pretends to care.

The Grand Alliance in the previous book starts off as the beleagured Allies (or Union Army), fighting off the inhuman Nazi scum (or slave-owning Rebel scum). And then the churning industrial machine of the Allies (or the North) takes over and just overwhelms anything the Bugs/Nazis/South can throw at them. The Alliance has heroic generals, of course. And heroic fighter pilots and heroic marines. And they spend the entire book killing every single Bug they can find, as a specific wartime policy. The Allies even have a Rule of Warfare that specifies Genocide as a Strategic goal! It's something they wrote when they completely eliminated a PREVIOUS race from existence.

Now, these elements existed in In Death Ground. But in that book we're still Americans/Brits/French. In Shiva Option, we decide that the only way to answer Bug/Nazi genocide is with geocide. So we decide that the only way to fight Nazis is to become Nazis.

One of the Allied Admirals even says something to that effect, saying that one of the horrors of war is that we often adopt the horrible tactics of our enemy. In this case, he means kamikaze attacks.

But in the Civil War, we didn't enslave the plantation owners (no matter how many later-day Southern apologists try to re-write history). In World War 2, we didn't kill every living German in response to the Holocaust. Adopting tactics in a specific situation because it's best of bad options is significantly different from adopting the end-result of the enemy's morality.

Sure, sure, but these are BUGS. Big, scary Bugs. Bugs the Allies never bother even TRYING to talk to (in this book). Morality need not apply.

This book would be vaguely stomach-turning, if it wasn't so boring. About 30 pages from the end, I decided that I didn't want to finish it. I had slogged through over 600 pages, but if I finished it, it would be like they had won.

It's like Orson Scott Card's series of books about Ender Wiggin never existed. If you haven't already, read those books instead: Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind. These aren't perfect books either, but they at least recognize some sense of morality in the aftermath of warfare.