Live Free or Die – harder

2 of 5 Space-Junk Stars – Live Free or Die by John Ringo.

A friend of mine has a hard-on for John Ringo. So he’s always pushing Ringo’s books down my throat. I started reading this book several months ago, but kept having to put it down, because one of the things I hate the most about any kind of fiction is fucking bullshit politics. And this book is FILLED with politics.

Why? Why the fuck do we need politics in space? When I first saw The Phantom Menace, my biggest complaint wasn’t about Jar-Jar, it was about all the fucking politics. I don’t get it. Why tell a story about congress? Why include any kind of politics in a story? It’s bullshit, and it just stalls the story. Politics just bore me to tears, and puts me to sleep every time.

But my friend assured me that this book was worth it. “Trust me, dude. You’ll love it,” he said. Well, fucking bullshit. I hated it. Well, I kind of liked the story, if that’s all it was, but unfortunately, it was inundated with so much political nonsense, that it just wasn’t worth reading. It was a waste of fucking time. I found myself fast-forwarding through pages, to find something that wasn’t littered with politics.

It’s the story that made me want to keep reading, despite the politics. It’s about an alien invasion. But it’s a friendly invasion, of sorts. The aliens just want to do some trades for some heavy metals. Nothing intrusive. We’re just friendly green guys, don’t mind us. Sure. Trust the aliens. Why not. I mean, they only destroyed a few cities. For sport. So they can’t be that bad, right?

But the aliens get bored with destroying things for sport, so they go out looking to get wasted, and come across a local drug dealer, Tyler Durden who’s gotten tired of running his fight club. Tyler learns that the aliens are semi-allergic to most foods on earth, so he sets out to find something that the aliens can tolerate. He makes a bit of a taste test for the aliens, using cups of just about everything. A cup of sugar, a cup of flour, a cup of oil, a cup of whale jizz, and a cup of maple syrup.

All of these choices make the aliens sick, except for the whale jizz. The aliens get high as balls off whale jizz. They can’t get enough of it. And they’ll give Tyler all the sexy technology they have for as much whale jizz as Tyler can provide. So in a very short period of time, Tyler Durden becomes the richest man in the world. I mean seriously, the richest man. Suddenly, he has more money than all the rest of the humans on the Earth combined. That’s a shit ton of dough, man. And a fuck-ton of whale jizz.

So, of course, Tyler Durden sets out to build his own Death Star, which he calls Troy. It’s nearly as big as our moon. Has walls that are a kilometer thick, and is pretty much indestructible. It doesn’t even need weapons. It’s so massive, it can just plow its way through any battle. Throw all the nukes you want at Troy, and it’ll just smile and keep coming at you. It will just keep coming and coming with its synthetic whale jizz. Because that’s how Tyler Durden rolls, man.

This really could have been a good book. But it wasn’t. Because of all the political horseshit. I couldn’t stand it. I had to dig through all that garbage to even find the fucking story. Which was actually a pretty good story, if you took out all the political shit. But it wasn’t a 400 page story. Maybe 200.

If Ringo had just published the actual story, without all the horseshit, it would have been 4 stars, at least. But no. He had to go and skullfuck it, like so many authors do. What a fucking waste. I really hope John Ringo chokes on some whale jizz, just for some poetic justice.

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