A review by trike
X-O Manowar Volume 1: By the Sword by Robert Venditti
4.0
I quite enjoyed this book. It's a fairly lightweight action story which combines ancient Rome with alien Iron Man-type armor and invading insectoid aliens. The hot-headed Visigoth warrior Aric leads the charge into battle against Roman legions, as the alien Vine are using the confusion and disarray of war to infiltrate humanity by planting sleeper agents and abducting human slaves.
It's an interesting mash-up of a premise that promises some wide-screen space opera in future installments, but we get precious few answers in this book. We don't really know why the Vine are invading and infiltrating, nor why they need slaves to work in the gardens of their gigantic spaceships, and we don't know anything about the Manowar battle suit, mainly because the Vine don't know anything about it, apparently.
I'm kind of hoping this is all going somewhere and the fact that even these powerful aliens don't know how some of this tech works means that they aren't its creators.
I don't really expect great revelations or tremendous storytelling, but for a fun action sci-fi story, it does the job nicely.
It's an interesting mash-up of a premise that promises some wide-screen space opera in future installments, but we get precious few answers in this book. We don't really know why the Vine are invading and infiltrating, nor why they need slaves to work in the gardens of their gigantic spaceships, and we don't know anything about the Manowar battle suit, mainly because the Vine don't know anything about it, apparently.
I'm kind of hoping this is all going somewhere and the fact that even these powerful aliens don't know how some of this tech works means that they aren't its creators.
I don't really expect great revelations or tremendous storytelling, but for a fun action sci-fi story, it does the job nicely.