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    War Dogs
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    War Dogs
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    War Dogs
    Audiobook8 hours

    War Dogs

    Written by Greg Bear

    Narrated by Jay Snyder

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    An epic interstellar tale of war from master of science fiction.

    One more tour on the red. Maybe my last.

    They made their presence on Earth known 13 years ago.

    Providing technology and scientific insights far beyond what mankind was capable of. They became indispensable advisors and promised even more gifts that we just couldn't pass up. We called them Gurus.

    It took them a while to drop the other shoe. You can see why, looking back.

    It was a very big shoe, completely slathered in crap.

    They had been hounded by mortal enemies from sun to sun, planet to planet, and were now stretched thin – and they needed our help.

    And so our first bill came due. Skyrines like me were volunteered to pay the price. As always.

    These enemies were already inside our solar system and were moving to establish a beachhead, but not on Earth.

    On Mars.

    A Hachette Audio production.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHachette Audio
    Release dateOct 14, 2014
    ISBN9781478982760
    Unavailable
    War Dogs
    Author

    Greg Bear

    Greg Bear was born in San Diego, California. His father was in the US Navy, and by the time he was twelve years old, Greg had lived in Japan, the Philippines, Alaska – where at the age of ten he completed his first short story – and various other parts of the US. He published his first science fiction story aged sixteen. His novels and stories have won prizes and been translated around the world.

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    Reviews for War Dogs

    3.5/5

    173 ratings16 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Great book! Nice tie in between sci-fi and military fiction!
    • 3/5
      A little complex for an audiobook on my phone. Good tech. Pretty good story. But I wish i had read it rather than listened through occasionally noisy backgrounds.
    • 5/5
      Although it’s a short listen Greg Bear delivered yet again. I hope he continues on this storyline.
    • 4/5
      Thrilling narrative, intriguing concept. End is a bit of a soft landing.
    • 4/5
      Good scifi. There characters were round enough and they plot was interesting.
    • 3/5
      It was a good story but ended like they cut it in half..........a sequal maybe.....
    • 3/5
      A nicely realised backgrund of settler societies on Mars, spoiled by a MilSF plot that is less imaginative or original than the author perhaps realises, and a set-up in terms of Alien Masters that begs a conceptual breakthrough that doesn't happen. Also Yemen is not in Africa.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      Back in the day I would have considered a new science fiction novel by Greg Bear a genuine event and the initial premise of Humanity being culturally and technologically uplifted by another race, in exchange for fighting in a common conflict, to be attractive. The question though is whether this really our fight; considering Bear's history of plots where all is not as it seems you can draw your own conclusions. The real problem with this story is that, due to the flash-back structure of the novel, I had a hard time maintaining interest as Bear pretty much deflates all the suspense, though maybe I'll give the next book in the series a try out of respect for Bear.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Excellent! I just wish there was more to the story.
    • 3/5
      Interesting way to pass an afternoon. But felt incomplete at the end. I wished there was more on what happened next.
    • 4/5
      Kind of one of those endings that makes me reserve judgement for after reading the rest of the series. Which I guess I’m now about to do.
    • 5/5
      The more I read of good ol' Greg, the more I like. While I'm sad I didn't discover him earlier, I'm also cognizant that any earlier and I may not have appreciated him as much.
    • 3/5
      If you are expecting something like David Weber's Manticoran books, with noble marines, think again. What you'll get in this book is a military organisation that would be quite at home in David Drake's 'Hammer's Slammers' universe.First Sergeant Venn and the rest of his squad are sent off to Mars to fight the Antagonists, archenemies of the Gurus who were sharing their technology with Earth - apparently with no strings attached until they mentioned the Antagonists. Oh yeah, and no profanity involving reproductive habits. In this particular instance Venn and his colleagues run into the tail end of a major push against the Antags. A failed push, which led Venn and his fellows without supplies or squads so they're on their last legs when they're rescued by a second generation Muskie, one of the original Terran colonists, who takes them to an unexpected place of safety - an abandoned mine that contained mysteries from the beginning of the solar system.There was a degree of hopelessness in the face of great odds that made Venn's survival rather unlikely and it takes a blast from the sky to make sure it happens but the underlying mysteries kept me reading. The ending was a bit ambiguous as well, making me wondering when the next entry in the series due out...
    • 4/5
      Novels set on Mars are written almost daily (or so it seems). Novels with aliens are at least as common. Military SF is also pretty common. But the master of the hard science fiction Greg Bear still manages to mix them again and create something new. Unfortunately the novel is uneven - and I suspect that part of the reason is the need to set his trilogy(or whatever this will end up being) while taking his sweet time to actually get there. Somewhere in the Earth's future, humanity had not only made it to Mars but also managed to abandon the pioneers that moved there. And out of a blue, some aliens show up (and not in one of the Western cities of the world for a change) and start sharing knowledge with the people of Earth - without demanding anything in return - or nothing too big anyway. And their gifts allow humanity to make leaps in all spheres of medicine and science and everything else you can think of. Until the bill is presented that is -- as it turns out our aliens did not just happen to be in the neighbourhood - they had been running from another race and they want humanity to help with the war - by basically leading the war instead of them. So humanity (or huge parts of it anyway) decide to help and the Skyrines (the Marines in the Sky) are shipped to Mars to deal with an enemy noone knows anything about, does not seem to be able to beat or even to see most of the time. And this is how the novel opens - or close enough -- Master Sergeant Venn is just back from a drop that went terribly wrong (but he made it out so he can tell his story). And the first half of the book is the story of the this drop - a military SF at its best - with all the roughness and courage and bravery of the genre and the Marines (I mean Skyrines) - going from one big mess into another and revealing parts of the past to us with their actions and words. If that was all that the novel was, I would have been a very happy reader. But that being Bear, he decides to make things weird and complicated. And when the weird starts happening in Venn's story, the novel start flipping between Seattle (where our narrator is hiding after coming back) and the story at Mars and things start getting weird in both places - secrets and unsaid truths start piling up, people behave in unexpected ways and somewhere along the lines things get so convoluted that I was not sure that I was reading the same novel that I started. Most of those lines remain unresolved (and if this is indeed a first in a new trilogy, this is where they will get resolved I hope) and it feels like a first part of a story - technically we do see Venn leaving Mars but the Mars expedition, so important in the first part of the book, becomes just the vehicle for the larger story in the second part. And that second story is up to nowhere. Despite that the novel is actually enjoyable - the last chapter of the novel allows Venn to try to guess what had happened really - and if there is never a sequel, this can serve as an explanation - it is logical and it does explain everything but it still leaves unresolved questions such as who are all those aliens and why everyone seems to want Mars.
    • 3/5
      I’ve never read Greg Bear before, and despite early reservations about his reputation as a hard science fiction author (hard sci-fi can be hit or miss with me) I was pleased that I would be able to get my feet wet with War Dogs, which from the title and cover looked to be a promising action-oriented military sci-fi novel. A futuristic tale about Space Marines on Mars! At first glance, it did sound like something right up my alley.The book started decently enough. We are introduced to protagonist Sgt. Michael Venn, one of many Skyrine soldiers called upon to fight an ancient galactic war that humanity really should have no business in. But thirteen years ago, Earth was visited by a mysterious extraterrestrial race called the Gurus, who lavished gifts upon us in the form of technological gifts and knowledge. At the time, the visitors demanded nothing in return, and for all intents and purposes their presence seemed benevolent and mostly harmless.Then the other shoe dropped, one that’s “completely slathered in crap” is how the official synopsis on the book’s description page so eloquently and colorfully put it. And why not? For it seems when humanity happily accepted the Gurus’ gifts so many years ago, it had inadvertently locked itself into an obligation to help them fight a war against their long-time enemies known as the antagonists, “Antags” for short. Grunts like Venn are the first to be sent off to the harsh landscape of Mars in the campaign against the Antags, for the enemy has already made their way to our solar system. When the mission gets shot to hell on his latest tour, Venn and his fellow soldiers are forced to simply try to survive on this dangerous planet where a new threat looms at every corner.To me War Dogs came across less like an action/military novel and more like a mystery, the reason being most of what happens on Mars is related to us after the fact, when Venn is back on Earth having survived and ensconced in a safehouse. The plot is thus revealed to the reader bit by bit, and what started out sounding like a war involving humans vs. aliens actually ends up being more of a conspiracy story. Which is fine and good, though admittedly the book was perhaps not as dynamic and conflict-driven as I would have liked. The information trickled forth slowly and parts of the narrative flat-out dragged its feet, especially once we hit the halfway point, which is regrettable considering the intriguing premise and Bear’s unique vision of Mars.And while we’re on the topic of Bear’s vision, I also believe this is a book that could have done with a bit more world-building, though in this area I realize we are limited by what our main characters knows. Which is, as it happens, very little. In many ways, this is your familiar of story about the loyal soldier whose focus is on the mission at hand rather than on questioning orders or the larger picture – it’s what makes the machinations that later emerge that much more impactful and engaging – but I still wish Bear could have somehow given us more on the novel’s premise. The background with the Gurus and their technological gifts was what drew me in in the first place, and it would have been great to know more about the aliens involved. As a reader, I felt uncomfortably distanced from the context of the novel, though a part of me also has to wonder if this was deliberately done for a reason.It’s not that this book didn’t work for me. In fact, it’s got the type of story I really enjoy, even more so than just your straight-up average military sci-fi, to tell the truth. Ultimately, I just think I expected a plot that more substantial and executed differently. War Dogs has the distinct feel of being the first book of a series, which isn’t always bad – but this one displayed the dreaded pattern of only going so far as to give you a decent premise without exploring much more. The beginning of the novel intrigued me, but the rest of it didn’t do as well as holding my attention until close to the end when some bigger developments finally started rolling in.
    • 3/5
      This was...weird. Every couple of chapters switches from the present day, where Master Sergeant Venn is recovering from and hiding out after his latest round of battle on Mars against Earth's enemy, the Antags, and flashback to the battle which took so many of his fellow soldiers' lives.Mixed in that battle is the discovery of a perplexing underground mining facility, which the descendants of Mars' colonists are trying to protect, the Antags seem to be trying to preserve, and Venn's superiors seem to already know about.This is the first in a series, so the story is not at ALL tied up in the end, making for a very, "wait, what?!" response on my part. Not sure if I'll continue with this series...Recommended for fans of hard sci-fi and space war.