Armor

Rating:
Summary: Best Sci-Fi book.....period.
Review: I'll put it bluntly...Armor is the best book I have EVER read. Mr Steakly is a master of descriptive writing. He takes you into every battle and makes you feel every word. His characters are fantastic...you laugh, cry and fear with these people...especially the main character, Felix.
I bought this book when it was first published and read late into the night over a period of days...spellbound...until I was done. WHAT A RIDE!
If you love action, adventure and Sci-Fi, then this is a book for you.
The emotion that is conveyed through Mr. Steakly's writing has no equal in my experience, and I have read ALOT of Sci-Fi and Fantasy from both unknown authors and the acclaimed "master writers". None can hold a candle to Mr. Steakly.
Felix is the main character in Armor. He is a man fleeing his past by enlisting in the Fleet. He gets sent to a planet known as "Banshee" to wage war on giant seven foot tall "ants". The key to the human offensive is in the super-suits that the men and women of the fleet wear...their Armor. The book is divided up into three parts...one concerning Felix and his alter-ego the "Engine", one with a secondary character Jack Crow, and a final chapter tying the other two parts together. The battles and action is so crisply detailed, so written in a train of thought manner, that you actually feel like you are there.
Buy it...read it...live it.
~Max~

Rating:
Summary: You can pass on this one.
Review: I'm sorry, but I simply cannot share in the praise that others are heaping on this book. The story started out fairly well, but it dropped off the deep end after the first quarter of the book. I just couldn't follow it; I forced myself to read another 50 pages before I gave up & put it away. Sorry, but I was hoping for more.

Rating:
Summary: One half's good, the other...
Review: I've read *alot* of scifi, and even if I don't share the literary pretensions of a some of the other reviewers, I think that know what I'm talking about. And when it comes to Armor, I'd have to say that overall it's a marginal book. I really liked the sections involving Felix, since they reminded me of "Starship Troopers" and "The Forever War", both of which are superior military scifi novels that I highly reccommend. If this book was expanded to consist of a 100% military plotline, it would rate at least four stars. The problem is that large sections (at least half) of the text are devoted to a separate plot that doesn't tie in with Felix's until the very end. It focuses on generally unlikeable characters and is poorly written, with a style that ends up bleeding over into the second Felix segment of the book. Although there is a link between the two plotlines revealed at the very end, the other protagonist (Jack Crow) detracts from Felix, who is the real star of the show. All in all, this is a decent book, but you're paying for a really good short story plus 200 pages of filler.

Rating:
Summary: An unusual and savage adventure
Review: I've read the comparisons of "Armor" to the classic "Starship Troupers" in other reviews and those comparisons do have merit on a superficial level. But at their core, the two books are fundamentally different. Whereas "Troupers" argued that conflict was necessary to the advancement of society, "Armor" is wearied by the utter futility of war. While the battle scenes in "Troupers" are exhilerating, the same scenes in "Armor" are grusome and depressing. "Armor" has no coming of age feel like "Troupers" and nothing good comes from the battles that are fought in its pages.

About one hundred pages in, the book makes an abrupt shift from the third person narrative following the hero (and sole survivor of its first battle) Felix to the first person narrative of adventurer Jack Crow. The shift is unexpected and abrupt and leaves the reader somewhat disoriented. It is in fact a high wire act as a plot device that author John Steakley manages to pull off successfully. Without the Jack Crow section, the Felix portion of the story would be unrelentingly bleak.

Overall, this is an excellent novel that is only weak around the margins. Numerous details are not fully explained and vivid descriptions are not Steakley's long suit. Nevertheless it is worthwhile example of military science fiction that rates only a notch or so below "Troupers" and "The Forever War."

Rating:
Summary: Bad Heinlein with Bad Language
Review: In all my years of reading science fiction of all sorts, this is only comparable in sheer lameness to the wonderful Retief stories after the author Keith Laumer had his stroke, and kept writing with apparently only half a brain. Garbled, pretentious, hand-me-down writing.

Okay so fighting the giant alien ants hand to hand in armored exoskeleton suits is second-hand Starship Troopers. So it's Heinlein without the quasi-libertarian-fascism. I don't mind that. I like stories about mindless killing of mindless alien hordes. No problem there. It's the pompous, typo-filled, hackneyed writing that bugs me. Mr. Steakley has forgotten the first law of fiction writing: "Show, don't tell".

Many have complained about the jarring switch to a second plot about the former pirate Jack Crow told in the first person. This isn't a problem either, it's like changing keys in a tune -- that part in the National Anthem when it gets hard to sing for instance. Could be a good thing. Cyberpunk writers swap back and forth between vantage points all the time. But this is so shoddily written. This second plot is like a bad fan-fiction cross between James Bond, Retief and Terry Pratchett.

Hey I like R-rated ... scenes and cursing as much as the next guy, and there's plenty of that here, but that's not the Bad Language I am talking about in my review title.

Rating:
Summary: great read, great technique
Review: It seems some reviewers focus on two aspects of this work to criticize: 1) the viewpoint shift in the "middle section" of the book and 2) the clipped narrative style. on the first: steakley gives us both ends of the telescope. first, he gives us felix in a tight third-person narrative that focuses on his perspective. that shows us felix from up close. then, jack crow looks back through time, and filters experiences through his own strange sense of ethics, as he evaluates felix's actions. we never see directly inside felix the way we see jack crow's opinions so directly. felix is always at arm's length, as it were, but we get to see how his mind works as mediated through 1) the third person detached narrative and 2) the first person detached narrative of someone experiencing what felix went through. and the sense of character is never lost! this is a fantastic literary technique, really. one that is very hard to do, since as the perspective of the narrative shifts, the subject matter shifts a bit as well. try doing it, describing similar experiences in the first and third persons. you have to think differently about what you are describing. the fact things stay consistent in this novel makes it pretty good writing.

now about the narrative stlye. that's twentieth century american prose for you. beginning with hemmingway, continuing through the great popularizers of the style, hammett and raymond chandler. and then look at the post-war era. the clipped, jerky style is supposed to make the reader's mind dart this way and that. read james ellroy for an overdose on this stuff. and here's the real point: some may think it's bad prose, but they should try to write something meaningful (like a story or even a simple description of an event) in that style. it is a mind-boggling task. the fact that a writer uses a clipped style doesn't make the writer bad in any way. it just demonstrates a fine ability to compress language.

Rating:
Summary: The Best of Our Best
Review: Ive read this book about 3 times and keep picking it up. I would suggest it to well...anyone really. Military, Scifi, and just people who admire good work. The plot is intriging and personaly id like to see a prequal and a sequal. There is so much we dont know about Felix like what his first name is, G? He made around 20 drops and we only see a tenth of those. Who is Jack Crow? How did he get to the Lyndril prison in the first place? And the Ants attack on central america is never really explained. And what about the armored olympics how does the war end? Theres so much information in the book and so much you just want to know. Thats what makes a greak novel, when you want more because the rest was fantastic!

Rating:
Summary: Ready for the real thing
Review: Ok, so you saw Starship Troopers, and you read the book. It was ok. It actually was good. Now, lets read the better version.

Armor is very close to the same story as ST, but with several twist.

This story is written in 2 different points of view... 3rd person and 1st person. It is two stories told by two different people with two different points of view about the same event.

As you read you find yourself wanting one point of view to give you more information so you can go back to the first point of view and experence the effects of ARMOR itself.

When you read, you will see the mountains, the creature coming over the walls at you, your heart will pound, and when it is done you will want more. You will put the book aside and watch it. Waiting for the day that you can pick it up... and read again.

So far I have read my old orginal verion, only difference is the cover art, five times and I have yet to get tired of it.

Rating:
Summary: simply amazing
Review: pure art, i can tell alot of love was put into this book. i am 15 and those cause to tell you this book is for all age's. it was simply perfect the storyline was amazing. the suspense was so great its not even funny. each part had such a great turn and you would just be amazed to read. i couldn't drop this book once i started.

Rating:
Summary: Good but not the equal of Heinlein's Starship Troopers
Review: Some literary critics have asserted that Steakley's Armor is the author's answer to Robert Heinlein's award-winning novel Starship Troopers; that may well be the case, but Armor though a good read is not quite at the same level as Heinlein's masterpiece.

Armor is a two-piece story set in a world very similar to that of Heinlein's book, where soldiers in mechanical combat suits battle giant "ants" (compare to Heinlein's "bugs"). One portion focuses on the memories of Felix, a reluctant but outstanding soldier in the seemingly never-ending war verses the ants; the other on a group of scientists and the pirate trying to take over their planet. The two tie together toward the end of the book.

Armor does deal with the futuristic military in a way very different from Starship Troopers; where the latter features characters built into civilized adults by their difficult experiences in combat, Armor's protagonist Felix instead finds war a terrible, inhuman, and even mechanical part of his life that he tries to put forever behind him. Unlike the patriotic and even at times fascist themes of Starship Troopers, Armor presents a much more disparaging view of war.

Overall, the book is worth a read and is fairly enjoyable; those who disliked Starship Troopers for its militaristic society or perceived glorification of soldiers might like to give Armor a try for its opposite take.