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Fads in publishing
I've enjoyed reading a lot of David Weber's books over the past few years. They're not fine literature, but they're usually fun (well, not Storm from the Shadows: ugh). That being said, I just spotted the following description for his upcoming novel Out of the Dark:
Earth is conquered. The Shongairi have arrived in force, and humanity’s cities lie in radioactive ruins. In mere minutes, over half the human race has died.
Now Master Sergeant Stephen Buchevsky, who thought he was being rotated home from his latest tour in Afghanistan, finds himself instead prowling the back country of the Balkans, dodging alien patrols and trying to organize the scattered survivors without getting killed.
His chances look bleak. The aliens have definitely underestimated human tenacity—but no amount of heroism can endlessly hold off overwhelming force.
Then, emerging from the mountains and forests of Eastern Europe, new allies present themselves to the ragtag human resistance. Predators, creatures of the night, human in form but inhumanly strong. Long Enemies of humanity… until now. Because now is the time to defend Earth.
The description sounds like vintage Weber, right up until I broke down laughing in the middle of the final paragraph. Seriously, folks. Hasn't this particular fad run its course yet? (Also, this sounds typical of Weber to the point of parody: it's exactly the blurb I would have come up with if someone had jokingly asked what sort of vampire story he'd write.)
When I shared this with Kim, she was immediately reminded of an amusing brief story on the Onion recently: 'Minotaurs The New Vampires' Says Publishing Executive Desperate To Find New Vampires.
[It sounds like Out of the Dark was originally a short story. One reviewer described it as follows: "A fast-paced, well-written story up until the last two pages, when it goes completely bonkers with an ending that explodes the corn-o-meter. If you can swallow the premise of the finale, this is a fun story." Sounds about right.]
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I'm apparently a bigger David Weber fan than you are, but i agree that it sounds pretty nuts. Even aside from the total shoehorning in of vampire look-alikes, if we're to believe the premise, humans are stronger than the predators (en masse at least) and the aliens are stronger than the humans, but the predators can beat the aliens?
Although the Weber series whose concept i'm even less enamored of is the one he's co-writing with someone about a universe-hopping fantasy empire colliding into a universe-hopping technological empire, and the two of them getting into a war. It just sounds like it was specifically tailored to maximize fanservice of the "he hefted his laser gatling gun, dodging spell-bolts as he waited for the fusion pack to finish charging, then opened fire on the wizard and the fire-breathing dragon he was riding, blowing both of them to little bits" variety.
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For what it's worth, my first instinct upon reading the review of the novella was that I might well enjoy it more than the expanded version. (I went looking to see if our library had that anthology, in fact.) It sounds to me like the vampires in the novella are essentially a twist that suddenly casts the story and the overall conflict in a new light at the end. Certainly high on the corn-o-meter, but depending on my mood I might think it was pretty cool. (Especially if it was a surprise... sorry!)
But I find that I rather dread seeing how Weber would actually use these new superhero (but Evil(TM)!) allies to tidily rescue humanity by the end of the story. It's not that I don't like the thought of humanity being rescued, and I even think the premise is kinda cool. I think I'm just a little tired of superhero stories (especially from Weber: he leans on that crutch far too often for my taste), and perhaps I'm particularly tired of superhero-vampire stories.
I haven't heard about that new Weber series. It sounds surprisingly similar to Interworld by Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves (a novelization of a TV show that they never sold), though only to one aspect of it.
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