Bishop arrives with an international team on a former Ruhar colony world. The Kristang (or 'lizards,' because they look like, well, humanoid lizards) are humanity's new allies. The Ruhar (or 'Hamsters,' because they look like six-foot hamsters, when they aren't in powered armor) are the aliens who invaded. Then another alien races arrives, liberates Earth from its invaders, and grateful humans sign up to fight for their new benefactors against the evil aliens who invaded them. By chance, he leads his hometown homies in one of the only successful human military operations in the invasion, and captures an alien. Joe Bishop is a US Army sergeant at home on leave. But a decent cheeseburger is tasty, and a good cheeseburger can be really, really good, and this is a good cheeseburger.

You aren't expecting a culinary experience that transcends previous cheeseburgers. (One of the running jokes in this book is how much the main character, Sergeant Joe Bishop, misses cheeseburgers.) You don't expect a cheeseburger to deliver an innovative new taste. The characters are fairly standard, the aliens equally so, the plot pretty much what it says on the cover. If this sounds a lot like Marko Kloos's Frontlines series, it's a lot like Marko Kloos's Frontlines series.Ĭolumbus Day is well-written. This self-published series is one of an endless parade of similar series being promoted on Amazon and Audible - military SF about a Joe Everyman who has to soldier up and fight aliens for Earth. So Columbus Day gets its name because that's the day that aliens invade Earth, but also, Earth finds out what it's like to be colonized by occupiers who then use you as proxy soldiers in a war between superpowers that you never cared about. The War of the Worlds is commonly understood to have been a metaphor for European colonialism, in which the Martians did to the British what the British had done to less advanced cultures. Our allies are.Ĭraig Alanson steals a page from H.G. We shouldn't even be fighting the Ruhar they aren't our enemy. So, I went from fighting with the US Army in Nigeria to fighting in space. The UN Expeditionary Force hitched a ride on Kristang ships to fight the Ruhar wherever our new allies thought we could be useful.

When the morning sky twinkled again, this time with Kristang starships jumping in to hammer the Ruhar, we thought we were saved.

Over the horizon came ships of a technologically advanced, aggressive culture, and BAM! There went the good old days, when humans got killed only by each other. There we were, innocently drifting along the cosmos on our little blue marble, like the Native Americans in 1492. We were fighting on the wrong side of a war we couldn't win.

Craig alanson columbus day