What do You think about The Protector's War (2006)?
The story picks up roughly ten years after the phenomenon that everyone has come to call "the Change." Things have more or less settled down in western Oregon. Tension continues, however, between the Protectorate and the other groups of the Willamette Valley. While the title suggests a war, the book deals mainly with events and developments leading up to such.We meet new friends and foes. Some of the old ones die. We see several types of communities rise up out of the ashes of the Digital Age, which is one of the things I find most fascinating about the series. The contrast between the new traditions, as well as the ways in which the new clashes with the old, as well as the new interpretations of what we today consider "the old" is interesting and sometimes entertaining. (Picture. for example, the Oregon State University football stadium, but with soldiers instead of football players, and with cheerleaders calling chants dealing with ACTUAL fighting, rather than the surrogate warfare that's typically the role of sports in the modern world.) The characters and the world have grown into themselves, as it were. But the struggle for long-term survival persists. There's a good balance between tastes of the duldrums of everyday life, the tension and headache of politics, and the excitement, terror, and horror of pre-gunpowder warfare--the latter of which ware more or less skirmishes, but still brutal enough.
—Nathan Miller
Stirling's characters are a bit clumsy and often interchangeable, and I still don't buy that so many people would suddenly drop everything and become Wiccans so quickly. Romance is particularly oddly written - if any one character ever shows remote attraction to another, you can guarantee the attraction is mutual.The title is also misleading - the titular war doesn't begin until the last 20 pages, and I assume the rest will play out in the concluding volume of the trilogy.Stirling's attitude in this book can be summed up as pining for the good 'ol days, before computers and technology ruined everything for us.The book also takes some odd structural turns, suddenly becoming a series of flashbacks for a little while in the later half, then switching back to the main action again.That said, I'm a sucker for post-apocalyptic survival stories, and seeing everyone retrofit the modern world back into a pre-industrial one is kind of fun. I really enjoyed the glimpses of the world beyond US shores that we got this time around.
—Chad
The author starts up the story in England, nine years after the change. It was lovely to have more characters, but the author's technique of flipping between storylines -- done well in the first book -- was really difficult in this book. Not only did he go between the storylines, but he kept moving the timeline -- it was hard to follow at times. I don't see that this technique furthered the plot or improved the book at all.I think the book was overall good, but perhaps the author waxed a bit too poetic in descriptions. I found myself getting bored in certain passages because I was reading too much descriptive prose -- and I'm a fan of that usually. I think this story is best served by being a bit more concise. I wanted to know what was going to happen next to these characters! And I found myself occasionally skimming over passages and then needing to go back because there was one important detail buried in the hefty paragraph I just skimmed.Overall, I liked the book. I'm completely enthralled by the storyline and am eagerly moving on to book #3. I'm hoping the writing returns to more of what I found in book #1 (Dies the Fire.)
—Deb
