Live Free or Die by John Ringo
Cover art by Kurt Miller
Published by Baen Books
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
John Ringo originally got published with a novel about a near-future First Contact, in which seemingly peaceable aliens arrived only to announce that warlike aliens were on their way. A Hymn Before Battle became the first of his highly successful Legacy of the Aldenata series, and launched a career. After completing the primary tetralogy of the Posleen War, Ringo wrote a spinoff trilogy in collaboration with Julie Cochrane and three side stories with Tom Kratman. (Another story, written with Michael Z. Williamson, has been stripped of its canonical status when Ringo decided to go a different direction with the series).
However, no commercial science fiction author, no matter how successful, can rest entirely upon a single series, no matter how popular. Even David Weber, Baen's flagship author, has several other (albeit smaller) series alongside the Honorverse. So as Ringo became more successful, Jim Been urged him to try creating something new. In addition to his collaboration with David Weber, which was military science fiction but more in the line of the Honorverse than the near-future setting of the Legacy of the Aldenata, he wrote a fantasy series which upon closer inspection proves to be a far-future world with technology indistinguishable from magic.
But it seemed that his near-future military science fiction sold best. Worried about poor sales on the fantasy series, Jim Baen made a pointed suggestion that Ringo create another fictional world with the same elements that made the Legacy of the Aldenata novels succeed. As a result, Ringo wrote another series with the help of Travis S. Taylor, telling the story of a physics experiment gone horribly wrong which opens gates between worlds, including one group with some very nasty aliens in it.
This novel grew from the author's fascination with webcomics. Way back in the original Aldenata tetralogy, when it was still being planned as a trilogy, Ringo was binge-reading Sluggy Freelance, and wove themes from it into his novels. There was even a giant tank named for one of the characters.
Around that same time, Ringo also became an avid reader of Schlock Mercenary, a webcomic set in a far-future space-opera world. Ringo began wondering how the situation originally came to be, and with the permission of the creator of the webcomic, this novel resulted.
It begins with a brief prolog covering several years from the arrival of a giant ring in the Sol System, the discovery that it is a stargate (thanks to it being used by some tramp merchanters), and the arrival of some serious nasty aliens who have decided they wish to be Earth's overlords.
The real story begins a few years after the arrival of Earth's would-be tyrants, with the introduction of Tyler Vernon, formerly a successful webcomic writer and artist, now broke, divorced, and struggling to keep his head above water financially by any honest job he can come by. Including splitting and hauling wood for an old woman who seems to take a sadistic glee in nitpicking how he stacks her wood to find any excuse to avoid paying him.
And then he goes to a science fiction convention to reminisce about the old days when there was a mass market for dreams of aliens, and gets to meet an actual alien. Fallalor Wathaet is the captain of a trading ship -- and a fan of Vernon's now-defunct webcomic TradeHard, in which the Ferengi Expies are the protagonists. As fellow Guests of Honor, they end up spending a good bit of the convention hobnobbing about the situation with the protection racket the Horvath have imposed upon Earth. Given that Wathaet has far better blocking software than anything humanity can muster, they can talk freely without fear the Horvath will discover a human has dared dish them and carry out mass reprisals (whether because they think it encourages humans to self-police or they have no concept of the individual and scattershot responses make cultural sense to them, nobody is sure).
On Monday Vernon returns home to his mundane life with one thing running in the back of his mind -- what can he find that cannot be easily replicated by the galactic civilization's fabers, but that can be produced in economically significant quantities by Earthlings. He settles on unusual foodstuffs, and gathers a number of them to meet with Wathaet before the ship takes off.
At first Wathaet plays it cool, passing over a number of things as toxic and others as insignificant. And then he comes to the maple syrup and responds like it's liquid crack.
Suddenly Vernon's got a problem -- if maple syrup is that desirable, the last thing he wants to do is make it too clear how it's made, and thus risk having the galactics go directly to the source and cut him out of the trade. So he spins an elaborate yarn about dragons being made to cry and their tears being distilled into this exquisite elixir. Wathaet is pretty sure that it's hokum from the word go, but doesn't want to offend someone who can get him something so desirable, so he plays along.
Pretty soon Vernon's got a good little trade going on with the maple syrup, enough that he's no longer getting castoff galactic tech in exchange, but stuff that's actually valuable. He decides it's time to push a little harder, to insist that he be paid in real galactic money like a civilized person, not trinkets for savages.
However, the Horvath note the interest of other galactic species in Earth's maple syrup -- and decide to horn in on the supply. That's when they get an ugly lesson in just how foolish it is to interfere with a process that requires specialized skills and techniques, and must be carried out during a very specific and limited time of the year. When the maple syrup farmers refuse to carry out their harvest, the puppet US government sends in the National Guard -- who do about as well as expected when they have little or no experience, to the point there's no telling how much is passive-aggressive resistance and how much is genuine incompetence.
Finally the Horvath back down on their attempts to gain control of the maple syrup trade, and Vernon is able to leverage his new triumph to actually board a Glatun trading ship to visit other worlds, he's able to leverage his position as the source of maple syrup and actually do things. He gets himself an upgrade, courtesy of an alien who looks like a giant scarab beetle, that greatly enhances his strength and health, not to mention enabling him to interface with galactic information systems. And then he buys a ship.
But not just any ship. This is a used construction ship, with four auxiliary ships that can work together to do construction in space -- and Vernon has a lot of ideas about what can be done with such a ship and the rich resources of the Asteroid Belt. He's already the world's richest man, but he sees a lot more opportunities to use that wealth to make more wealth -- and to make it impossible for the Horvath, or any other would-be tyrants, to take over humanity.
And it's a good thing, because it turns out the Horvath are sore losers. Far from accepting the loss of the Maple Syrup War with good grace, they intend to get their revenge.
At first it seems insignificant -- their picket ship shifts orbits, going into a polar orbit that allows them to cover the entire Earth instead of just passing over the most populated areas of the world as its former inclined orbit did. But shortly thereafter, people all over the world start coming in reporting a strange lesion, always on the inner left wrist, just below the hand. It starts as a painless pimple, which pops but leaves an open sore that just won't go away, unless it's treated with an antibacterial (Betadine's ideal, or its generic versions, but even alcohol will do in a pinch).
Just as a doctor at a free clinic is noticing a pattern, one of her patients suddenly develops a catastrophic new development of it. He's a homeless man, probably an addict or mentally ill, certainly someone with his life in disarray. And he's got another of those sores. No big deal -- until he goes into convulsions and dies right in front of her whole crew. That was bad enough, but it gets even worse after he's sent to the morgue -- and his corpse suddenly starts sprouting dozens of those sores all over, each with its nasty little worm.
Now she calls the CDC, and things start happening -- which includes Vernon getting in contact with Glatun medical experts. It appears that this disease is a sort of "separator," to sort out people who take care of things from people who ignore them. People who have their lives together vs. people whose lives are in hopeless disarray. But not a perfect one -- almost immediately, senior medical officers in the military become concerned that they're going to lose a lot of good troops because these guys are hardcore and don't want to waste time going to sick call over a sissy little sore. And as I was reading that, I realized that there were a lot of other people who have their act together but are apt to let something seemingly small slip by. Busy people, like students, senior executives or caregivers, who are so chronically short of time that their attention has perpetual tunnel vision. If the importance of treating that sore ASAP isn't forced into that tunnel, they're going to be so busy dealing with everything else in their lives that it slides until it's too late.
And that's just the first of a very nasty package of bioweapons the Horvath have released on humanity. Several kill off people with a whole range of pre-existing conditions, while the final one kills off everyone with dark hair.
Here's where John Ringo slips in some thoughts about society without ever crossing the line to heavy-handed message fiction. We're in the midst of a race against time to save humanity from its would-be overlords' decision to play eugenicist, but success requires several important mental and social characteristics. One of the biggest and most important is trust -- the cure is beyond the capacity of human technology, but anyone who has galactic implant packs is producing medical nannites that will do the job quite handily. However, to receive the benefits of those treatments, everyone has to be willing to trust that these nannites are indeed what they are said to be -- and for a number of societies around the world, that's simply too big a leap of faith to be managed. In some, the leadership condemns the treatments while secretly getting them for themselves, thus condemning their own people to death. In others, even the leadership can't even scrape up enough trust to get themselves treated while letting everyone else die, so the entire country falls into the dumpster of history.
But there's little time to ponder those concepts, because Vernon is now determined to make the Horvath pay for this atrocity, and pay dearly. He's been secretly building a warship of his own, and now he and his astronaut partner take it out against the picket ship that's been in orbit over Earth ever since the Horvath announced their dominion over the planet. It's a hot and ugly fight, and not without a price -- before being destroyed, the Horvath ship manages to destroy several more cities.
And remember that thing about Horvath being sore losers -- now they decide to retaliate even more harshly, sending several more warships through the Gate to attack every major city they can hit. By this time, Tyler's got a number of additional military assets in space, and destroys every one of the ships -- but not every one of the weapons before they can impact. The death tolls are horrific, not to mention the loss of cultural artifacts in the museums and other historic sites in those cities -- the Sistine Chapel, the British Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian, the Taj Mahal are only the most obvious.
But it only makes Vernon all the more determined that he is going to secure humanity's safety once and for all. Ultimately it's going to mean taking the war to the Horvath, but right now he's going to focus on building the biggest and most powerful defenses he can create -- which means acquiring a ship faber and the necessary AI to run it. But first he must impress upon the AI what it means to be an American AI -- and the AI takes it far more seriously than he ever expected, downloading and assimilating not only the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, but also a wealth of American political writing from the Federalist Papers to the story present. In seconds, although she says that it will take time to fully digest all the implications of the historical conditions that led to the creation of several key provisions.
Now Vernon's able to dream big, and does he ever, drawing on some old science fiction stories from his childhood to create a combination battle station and ark the size of the Death Star from Star Wars, except in the hands of good guys. And given that this is a novel being written by John Ringo and published by Baen, you can bet there's going to be a climactic battle in which the bad guys get their asses thoroughly thrashed and sent running back from whence they came. But it's also an ending that makes clear that this is but a skirmish in a much larger and longer war.
Buy Live Free or Die from Amazon.com
Review posted February 6, 2021
