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Title: Berserker
Series: Berserker #1
Author: Fred Saberhagen
Rating: 2.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages: 179
Synopsis:
Humanity has spread through the stars and every intelligent race is so ultra-peaceful that when an ancient set of planet size killing machines wake up, Humanity is the last chance of All Life in the Entire Universe.
My Thoughts:
I read this back in highschool and all I can remember from that time was that I found the overall tone rather dry.
Well, this time through I STILL found this dry and bordering on the line of plain old boring. A series of short stories that were tangentially related through various characters. Of course, each story is dealing with the Berserkers.
Berserkers, left over machines from an ancient race so old that there isn’t even a record of them except for the Berserkers, were created to be death dealers in a war so vast that it got out of control and the Berserkers wiped out their masters. And now they are OUR problem.
This should have been cool, thrilling and edge of your pants exciting. But it wasn’t. Saberhagen seemed to do his best to be pedantic and putting his words together like he was building a brick wall instead of a thrilling roller coaster. There was no menace, no real sense that the End of Everything is upon us. The narrator was an alien, but that was no excuse for how text-book like this was.
There are several more books in the Berserker series, but I certainly will not bother with them. I don’t want to take a drink of water with every chapter I read.
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