| Hell Hath No Fury (Multiverse II) | 
 enlarge | Authors: David Weber, Linda Evans
Publisher: Baen Books
Category: Book
List Price: £17.50
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 272037
Media: Hardcover
Edition: Har/Cdr
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 512
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 6.1 x 1.7
ISBN: 1416521011
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781416521013
ASIN: 1416521011
Publication Date: February 12, 2007
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
Second in the excellent Multiverse series September 6, 2008
This is the second in the "Multiverse" series by Dave Weber and Linda Evans and follows on from the excellent "Hell's Gate."
Tells the story of contact and increasingly of conflict between two civilisations, both spanning multiple universes.
Between one and two centuries before the events of these novels, portals start to open between different versions of the planet earth - apparently between parallel timelines. Most of the different universes are not inhabited by intelligent life, but two have human civilisations. Both start to explore the new worlds to which their homeworlds are suddenly connected. At first neither finds any sign of intelligent life.
Then on a world new to both civilsations, a lone scout from a military survey party of the Union of Arcana encounters a single member of an armed civilian survey party from the world called Sharona. Nobody, including the reader, would ever know for certain who shot first, because one was killed and the other mortally wounded. At first each side believes it has been attacked.
Both civilisations now spread over hundreds of worlds, and their cultures have more in common than either realises, but their technology is utterly different. Sharona's is broadly similar to our science, and their engineering and construction abilities are in most respects about where our Earth was in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including railways, machine guns and heavy artillery. They don't have radio but do not need it because their scientists have discovered how to train people to use certain psionic talents such as telepathy. Neither do they have any form of aircraft.
Arcana, by contrast, has very little of what we would call engineering - the most advanced weapon they which does not use psi-abilities/magic is the crossbow - but they have formidable weapons of a completely different type. Firstly they have trained creatures from their world, such as flying, fire-breathing dragons, which are just legends in ours. Secondly their magical/psionic talents, while operating on different principles, are more powerful than those of the Sharonians, and include the ability to store energy and information in crystals so as to be able to use them like a handgun or a laptop computer.
So when these two utterly different civilisations find themselves at war, each is able to inflict surprise after surprise on the other.
At the start of this book the two civilisations have made a temporary truce after a series of clashes of arms. Negotiations are under way, which the decent people who are a majority of both sides want to succeed. Unfortunately both sides have their share of wicked individuals. On the Arcanan side, a country called Mythal is ruled by a hereditary caste of magic users called the shakira, who resent the fact that the Union of Arcana constitution gives the other castes some rights and restrains the power of the shakira.
An evil conspiracy of these shakira has some of its people in key positions among the the Union of Arcana army units and diplomats who are dealing with the Sharonians. These individuals decide that provoking a war with the Sharonians is the best way to trigger the conditions which will let the Shakira launch a bid for total power in Arcana ...
Soon both sides will have more victims to mourn and more stories of atrocities, mostly true when told by the Sharonian side, mostly black propaganda from the Union of Arcana, will lead to a downward spiral of ever-greater anger between these two nations make a multiverse-spanning war look increasingly inevitable ...
Before I read these books I thought they might be just another rehash of John Barnes' "Timeline wars" stories of the battles against the Closers (e.g. Patton's Spaceship etc). Having now read the first two "Multiverse" books I think that does Weber and Evans an injustice. If you do like Barnes' "Timeline wars" books you will probably love this series but it's not just a rehash of the same idea, there are a lot of very original aspects to the clash of civilisations in these books.
I can strongly recommend both "Hell's Gate" and "Hell Hath No Fury."
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