I wasn't going to do this one next, as I've still got a number of books to catch up on; however, I got a message from my friend Beaker, and he asked me: "So, John Ringo went bad in East of the Sun, West of the Moon?"

I'm not certain why he thought I thought that (heh) but you know what - he didn't.  It's actually quite the fun book.

This is the latest (and possibly the last, but I can't remember what the latest news on that is) book in the Council Wars series.

What's great about the book is while there is sex in it, Ringo has stepped away from the graphic (and kinky) stuff that he often got into in his other books.  The sex here is almost all off-stage, and the one character having the most of it is basically part of the humor factor in the book.

The rest of the time it's a fairly typical Council Wars read.  It's light, it's fast, it's fun.

There's a fuel tanker returning for the power plants on Earth.  Both sides want to take control of it to help cut off their enemies.  After an enemy raid wipes out the initial commando team for the good guys, it's up to Herzer, his new fiancee and a keyholder Megan, and a ragtag group to not only come up with a way to get onto the ship, but a way to take it over and stop the bad guys from doing the same.

So it's a bit of the typical "good guys get cold cocked, have to do some jury rigged technology fun, and then take the fight back to the bad guys".

it's not deep but it's fun.  That's what a lot of the Council Wars has been - it's just a fun, fantasy/sci-fi hybrid that makes for a good read.  And, in a lot of ways, while this book seems short, it feels like a good throwback to the fun Ringo that got me hooked on his stuff.

I read the 547 pages of Against the Tide in one day.  That might tell you a few things:

1.  I'm a fast reader.
2.  I perhaps read when I shouldn't be reading.
3.  It's an engaging enough book to keep me sucked in for that length of time.
4.  Ringo writes a fast read.

And those things are all true.

Against the Tide is the sequel to Emerald Sea and part three of the Council Wars series.  As such, you really need to have read the first two books, plus the supplemental short story at the end of Emerald Sea (the close to soft-core porn "Megan's Tale") to understand where all the characters are coming from.

And at the risk of being spoiler-ish, don't read the list of key-holders at the end if you can't remember people's names.

Anyways, the book is fairly straightforward.  The UFS navy - building up in the previous book - has just been handed a resounding defeat, and it's up to Talbot to save it and stop a possible invasion of Norau.  As is pretty much standard with Ringo, you know the good guys are going to win and the bad guys get killed in a violent and vindicative manner - it's just a question of how.  Still, it kept me turning the pages to see what happens next.

There's good and bad.  Yes, it's a fun, somewhat light story.  There's no Bun-bun in this one, which I was glad for.  Instead, Ringo's enthusiasm has gone more into sex (as seen throughout this series, really, as well as in some of his other books, such as the fairly execrable Cally's War).  That's kind of the thing you have to get used to with Ringo's books, at least, in my opinion - he has the enthusiasm for certain things, and they start to permeate all his work.  At first it was Sluggy Freelance.  His references to it were what got me into the Posleen war stories (and his adage about rednecks and antimatter are what sold me on it), but they started going over the top in When the Devil Dances.  Later, with Princess of Wands and Cally's War you started seeing his enjoyment of the band Evanescence - which I have nothing against, either, I do own one of their CDs that's in heavy rotation in my car, but having disparate characters in disparate books ruminate on Amy Lee and the meaning of the lyrics can grate a bit.  Nowadays, it seems like he's gotten more into the "I love sex" and specifically sub/dom relationships, and hey, that's great for him - but it's not what I'm buying his books for, I'm buying for fun military action.  He does seem to try hard to treat rape with the proper respect such a horrible crime requires, but it starts to get a bit, I don't know, perhaps weird when one of the first things the "fall in love at first sight" couple talks about is which one is a dom and their experience with subs and other doms.

Man I'm going on a sex related tangent here - but you can kind of get the drift for his later books.  I'm still enjoying them overall, but seriously, if I wanted to get into the BDSM scene I'd get a book about that - not a book about military sci-fi/fantasy.

Bast does return in this book and for whatever reason, I find her less annoying than in the past.  Still, I wonder how she's supposed to be portrayed - on one page, she'll be talking like Yoda or something, and on the next, talking like a southern sailor.

In general, though, the book lives up to typical Ringo, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.  There are "bad" good guys - they are, for the most part, incompetent or corrupt military or political bureaucrats.  You've seen that in almost all of his books.  The bad guys are convincingly evil and to a point a bit bumbling.  The good guys are strong jawed and heroic and win the day.  (Oops - did I say that?)

It looks like from what I've read that the next book is the last one at least this decade - in Ringo's terms, sales have "tanked".  It's a bit disappointing.  I might harp on the what I consider stereotypical Ringo-isms (the enthusiasms, the "nerd grows up big and strong and badass" in Herzer, the "bad" good guys mentioned before) but the books are still fun, and I'd love to see how they overall end up.

But I don't have all his books yet.  I don't have the Kildar series (though I have been warned there's much more sex in those), Princess of Wands, Into the Looking Glass (which I have been looking forward to quite a bit), Von Neumann's War, or We Few (I think that he and Weber make a great combo, and I've been meaning to get this one).  Then again, I like books in paperbook, not hardback - easier to carry around - so it might be a few months.

I freely admit. I'm a John Ringo fan. Now, I'm not as much a fan of his as I was in the past. He hit a spot where I feel like he was writing more for quantity than quality, and did a lot of sub-par collaborations. The March to the Stars series with David Weber was really good, in my opinion - Cally's War was complete crap. He also gets over-enthusiastic about some things. Yes, I like Sluggy Freelance, too, but he went overboard with the references in the last two Posleen war books, and it hurt them. I also listen occasionally to Evanescence (laugh if you want), but I don't need at least one character in almost every book to listen to it and comment on it (at length, at points).

Emerald Sea is the sequel to "There Will Be Dragons", the post-futuristic fantasy series he's started. Basically, it's set over a thousand years in the future. Everyone had just about whatever you could imagine - teleporting, shields, Changing (note the capital C) into other forms, what have you. The first book detailed the war that broke out among the Council, the remnants of government, and how it took the energy from Mother, the governing AI - so now everyone is cast down to a substenance level, and explosion protocols prevent gunpowder and high power steam, etc.

In other words, "fantasy".

First off - unlike a lot of sequels, you have to read "There Will Be Dragons" before this one. Otherwise you will be very confused. I think "Emerald Sea" is better than TWBD, but that's just me.

Basically, it's the tale Herzer, the standard Ringo "nerd who becomes buff killing machine" and the Talbot family as they journey into the Florida keys area to try to convince the mer and delphinos to join their battle against New Destiny, who sent orcas, a kraken, and some ixchitl (manta ray type Changed). Of course, New Destiny has no subtlety or tact, and just does the "violent bully" routine, which keeps the good guys conveniently white hat during the battle. Through some improbable circumstances, two of the other characters from the first show up, and at times you get the feeling that the entire group is a bunch of min-maxed roleplaying hack and slash types.

Ringo wrote the book after visiting the Isles himself, and admits he was writing something like up to 18,000 words a day. His raw enthusiasm shows through the spotty writing, and that's part of the "fun" factor of the book. He also writes himself in, to a point, making fun of himself as the characters complain about a novel written about the events in the first book. I found that annoying the first time I read the book, but this time it was a bit amusing.

For the most part, the Council War series are fun fluff. They're fun, they don't necessarily have a lot of substance, but are almost the "beach read romance novel" for sci-fi nerds like myself.

But that's not all that's in the book. Just so you know, of course. There's a 100 page story after the novel called "Megan's Tale", involving the daughter of one of the characters in the novel. Unlike the two books themselves - best described as military fantasy - this is basically sci-fi-softcore porn, almost ready made for Skinemax. As his books have gone, Ringo has gotten more and more into the sex bits. It's not a bad story, necessarily - in terms of strict writing, I think it's better written than the actual novel - but it adds a weird feeling coda to the end of the book.