Book Note: David Weber, The Shiva Option

This note contains spoilers for the book.

By David Weber and Steve White, actually. Part of the Starfire series. This one suggests the order is Insurrection, Crusade, In Death Ground, The Shiva Option. I've read IDG and then I. Can't find Crusade locally yet, though Amazon seems to show it as available. I think perhaps these books weren't published in the order of internal chronology.

I rather like the handling of the Bugs. We get lots of passages from the point of view of bug directing intelligences—without ever seeing a clue as to where they fall on the "individual" to "hive mind" spectrum. There's clearly some separation; bug planetary systems make decisions for their own benefit, to the detriment of other systems. The bugs are pretty clearly telepathic (and FTL telepathic at that), but we don't know much about else them. There's pretty clearly not much individual in each individual; they sacrifice themselves in ways quite incompatible with that.

We have the same sort of completely crazy peacenik legislators as I've gotten so tired of over in the Honorverse. Not so many of them here, but still too many. I find them completely unbelievable; nothing I've seen in the real world has struck me that way. Well, except for Jane Fonda, and even that depends a bit on who you believe. Anyway, not common, not worth this much wordage to run it into the ground.

And at the end, all the bugs are dead. Except for that "seed" they sent out to start a new set, anyway.