Review Tuesday: ARMOR by John Steakley

I am a big fan of the book STARSHIP TROOPERS by Robert Heinlein. The sci-fi classic was originally published in 1959 and changed the way future wars would be fought in science fiction. But it wasn't just the marauder suits that made the tale compelling, it was the life of a soldier in the future, having to deal with life on the battle field fighting highly intelligent spiders, and life off of the battlefield, working on being an officer and all that's involved in that.  

For years a friend of mine has been on my case that I should read Armor by John Steakley. His comment was, "It's just like Starship Troopers," which was good enough to lure me in and brings me to today's review.

ARMOR

by John Steakley

An intergalactic war against a race of giant ants pushes one armored scout to the limits of his own sanity. 

When my friend said this book was just like Starship Troopers, I didn't expect it to be exactly like Starship Troopers, but it sure came close. Published in 1984 this book starts off like the harshest pages of Starship Troopers, with the good guys in powered armor get their asses handed to them on the home planet of an insectoid race. Instead of small space spiders, the enemy of mankind in ARMOR is a race of giant ants, and the war is the Ant War, not to be confused with S.T.s Bug War. 

You are in the sitting in the head of Felix, who manages to be the sole-survivor of several attacks on this toxic ant planet. Why in the hell the Earth forces keep dropping soldiers onto a planet that humans can never occupy is quite beyond me, but it's explained away as military un-intelligence.

You turn a page, and you go from Starship Troopers to Pirates of the Caribbean. Suddenly the story shifts over to that of a famous swashbuckling space pirate and his antics. So now you have half the book dedicated to this other story-line that, predictably crosses paths the the original.

I have to say, I wasn't happy with a lot about this book. There are spots where the writing just makes no sense. Then there are tons of useless development that goes nowhere, while other areas that screamed out to be developed and were ignored. Then there were the repeated references to blondes being the prettier females of the human race. Argh.

There were several occasions I found myself uttering, WTF?! but I soldiered on with this. I was committed right up until the ending that I saw coming from the planet Banshee. 

Read the original, not this knock-off. But if you insist, find it HERE.