Baen, 2001, $7.99, ISBN 0-671-31987-6, paperback, 599 pgs

In the far future, Earth and its many colonized worlds outlawed wars. With the exception of a few space pirates, nobody takes on anybody--there's too much open space and too many habitable planets. If you don't like something, you leave to start anew. And then 16,000 spaceships entered Earth's neck of the galaxy, and the aliens were of one mind: extermination of the humans.

Dalmas' future vision certainly is cozy at its start, but tends to become disjointed as you continue on. Little conundrums creep in, like the space-faring bad aliens not having a brain among them, or the human peace movement advocating terrorism to force the government to surrender to the aliens. It's not that the explanations are too far-fetched, but that the process seems skewed. The aliens arrive only because a massive telepathic race of other aliens teleported them here. I couldn't help but think of Star Trek Voyager.

Anyway, the humans have to raise an army and navy, and in a miraculously short period of time, they do. And a crack fighting force it is, including the roughest, toughest, rootin'-tootin' unit in the universe: the Amish. I kid you not. Oh, they're called Jerusalemites, but what else would you label an isolated group who eschew power tools, read only the Bible, and shun the outside world of the Commonwealth? Evidently, they adapt well to technology (including cyborgs) and fight like hell.

The aliens can pursue no other tactic than "human" wave attacks like the Japanese in WWII, Chinese in Korean War, or the Iranians in the Iran-Iraq War. No wonder the Amish are so good.

The aliens, by the way, are centaurs. By sheer co-incidence, in John Ringo's series published five years later, the aliens are centaurs. And they use "centaur-wave" tactics. Go figure. The Centaur Anti-Defamation League is drawing up protests as we read...

I'm not sure if Soldiers is supposed to be somewhat farcical, but the contrivances are many. The prose is fine, but the premise didn't work for me. The action scenes were acceptable, but I would find it hard to believe that the aliens could be that dopey and still exist to continue to conquer galaxies.

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