Book #118 of 2023:
Orion and the Conqueror by Ben Bova (Orion #4)
This isn’t the worst title of the Orion saga — it’s a noticeable step up from the angst-ridden previous volume — but it might well be the most boring. Much how the first half of Vengeance of Orion was little more than a straightforward retelling of traditional accounts of the Trojan War, this fourth novel is almost entirely just a factual presentation of the later years in the reign of Philip of Macedon, leading up to his assassination and the succession of his son Alexander the Great. Oh, there are some nominal sci-fi trappings: the reincarnated super-human warrior Orion is there as our witness to events, of course, and the king’s wife Olympias is quickly revealed to be Hera, one of the far-future advanced beings of this series who have gained time-travel and retroactively inspired the pantheons of various world religions. But neither of them make any particular impact on the established timeline, in the end.
Historical fiction has its place, and author Ben Bova seems to have done all the appropriate research for it here, but that’s not really what I’m looking for in a story like this. It doesn’t help that the protagonist’s current mission is so obscure for so long, or that he’s lost most of his memories again (including his original twentieth-century textbook knowledge of Philip and Alexander, which could have at least added some pathos and dramatic irony to the affair). And it’s certainly not great that the divine villainess’s main role in the plot is to repeatedly torture and rape the hero, a topic which this 1994 pulp adventure is not remotely able to handle with the care that it deserves. But this is primarily just a novel-length treatment of a real military leader’s rise and fall, which I guess is fine as far as it goes.
[Content warning for pedophilia, incest, suicide, and gore.]
★★★☆☆
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