Bugs that eat babies

Buglips wrote:The "on death ground" and "shiva option" books still give me the screaming willies. I think those are some of your very best work. Not a lot of fluff or switching perspectives and timelines like your later stuff. Just one perspective, one timeline, lots of skulking about, hair-raising suspense and adrenaline pumping action when contact is made. It simply does not get any better than that.

Whenever I recommend this series I always warn people NEVER to start the two final books on a work/school night because you just can't put them down. They never listen of course. This pattern repeats again and again which is high praise indeed for any book or series.

My question: Any chance the bugs will stage a comeback?

Put another way. I am asking, no begging, for the bugs to make a comeback. The bugs are a hive they can breed like…well like…bugs. They know the alliance. They know their tech and their tactics. They can regroup, rearm and mount a swarm attack that can demolish a quarter of the alliance in the opening weeks of a new war. Gather up the entire populations of planets and disappear back down their trapdoor to eat the spoils. Each trip out they are stronger and more numerous while the alliance is weaker with entire planets stripped of life to literally feed the bug war machine. Figuring out where they will pop up next, planning to be in the right place at the right time with the right tech in sufficient strength under the right commander to blunt their advance would be hair-raising and epic stuff. You are the only one I would trust to do this story justice.

Hopefully I have primed the creative pump

viciokie wrote:All it would take to recement the federation is to find out the bugs still have hives left and that have to be taken out. I rather suspect it might be a short lived alliance if that happens but it would be enough of a threat to force them to temporarily forget past issues. A good analogy of this is the alliance of convenience we had with russia during WW11. Believe me most nations hated russia then but they hated germany even worse.

munroburton wrote:It would be difficult to pick up the story where Weber left it, as two Starfire novels have been published without his involvement - Exodus and In Extremis, dealing with a new enemy.

Both of those continued to evolve the Starfire universe, introducing new technologies, bigger ships and even bigger ships. The Bugs advance very slowly on their own, unless responding to a specific problem(ie, gunboats to counter fighters, monitors to counter command datalink), so I imagine they would steadily fall behind technologically. And they never did manage to penetrate deeply into Allied space, so just as the Grand Alliance didn't know there were only five nodal systems, the Bugs never knew the four races .

I think at one point, Trevayne tells the President that the fleet they have assembled is far more powerful than the Grand Fleet that ended the Bug War. And that's only one of their fleets.

That's assuming the bugs managed to succeed with their version of Operation Ark - they were themselves in doubt of this. I remember something about there not being enough time to send a complete grafting through the closed warp point.

Personally, I wouldn't be that interested in a new Bug War. We know the bugs would do exactly the same thing - throw their stockpile of ships away on grinding frontal assaults, horrifically-baited traps, mass transits and kamikaze attacks. Got plenty of those in IDG&TSO.