Big Red
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- $2.99
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
We have always been here...
Traumatized by the effects of Compression travel, soldier Darren Loughlin holds the key to the fate of Earth’s Martian colonies. With his Battalion decimated, his fractured memory holds the only clues to the colony-wide communications blackout.
With time running out, Darren pieces together his year-long tour of duty with the Mars Occupation Force. Stationed in the Nazi-founded New Berlin colony, ruled by the brutal MARSCORP, he recounts his part in the vicious, genocidal war against the hostile alien natives and all who question Terran supremacy.
But as his memories return, Darren suspects he is at the centre of a plot spanning forty years. He has one last mission to carry out. And his alien enemies may be more human than he is…
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the beginning of this strange military SF tale, the narrator is just regaining consciousness after some severe trauma, and the novel alternates scenes showing his recovery and the interplanetary skullduggery that injured him. He is Darren Loughlin, a young, underemployed Irishman who joins the military thinking he'll get an easy stint as a support troop. Instead he finds himself on Mars, ordered to fight insectoid native Martians and help enslave the unhappy, German-speaking human population, descendants of the Nazis who colonized Mars after WWII. The situation's even more bizarre than that, since he's not in his own body but one that was cloned on Mars by ruthless MARSCORP. Oh, and in the process, he and his fellow victims were sent back in time; the year is now 1975. Larkin's no-nonsense prose works to conceal the plot's goofiness for a while, but readers eventually realize that this novel contains enough ingenuity for three or four less frantic but more convincing ones.
