Legion of the Damned

Legion of the Damned, Book 1

By: William C. Dietz

Narrated by: Donald Corren

Length: 13 hrs and 16 mins

Publisher's summary

In the future, the terminally ill can prolong life by surrendering their consciousness to a cybernetic life form that is then recruited into the notorious Legion of the Damned, an elite fighting unit charged with protecting humanity.

Listen to more titles in the Legion of the Damned Series.

©1993 William C. Dietz (P)2010 Audible, Inc.

Worth the price of admission

Reminded me of the Robert A. Heinlein books I loved as a kid. A blend of techno-nerd science fiction and a good ole fashion inner-species love story. I was happy to see the series has many more volumes.Narration was comfortable and a good fit. I have just downloaded the next two books in the series and I am looking forward with optimism and anticipation to the continuation of a very satisfying book.

Enjoyable Read

I quite enjoyed this book and am partway through Book 2 in the series right now. Yes there are some sci-fi tropes in the book, but they don't get in the way of a pretty darn good story. The geopolitical situation outlined in the book is complex enough to keep things moving along with many different angles to consider. There were also plenty of very interesting concepts (paranoid aliens? love 'em) that pop up throughout the book and I, like some other reviewers, enjoyed the backstory of the French Foreign Legion as well. While it is not Great Literature, if you are looking for an enjoyable military sci-fi book I don't think you can go wrong.

Really good.

This is a great listen, very well thought out and very enthusiastically read. While it is a little confusing at first with how it jumps around from place to place you will get the rhythm and love it. Ive search for mlitary science fiction and rarely find anything that makes me want to list to the entire series and this fit the bill.

Who says that being stubborn is a bad thing!

Yep, if I wasn't stubborn, I probably wouldn't have gotten past the first hour of this audiobook. It starts out grudgingly slow, and extroadinary detailed. All of the details seemingly don't mean anything to you, and you realize that you are losing interest, before you can even decide if you like the story or not.

However, my head-strong mentality mixed with my natural stubborness told me to push ahead, keep on trucking, and see if this story is really a wonderful train wreck, or simply a train wreck gone bad.

I was presently suprised around hour 2 when the tide started to turn in the author's direction: the details started to come together, the characters started to make sense, and the story truly started to materialize into something with a ton of potential!

If I only knew what was in store for me at the time. If I had listened to the negative reviews, if I had succumbed to the boring and drawn out introduction, I too would have given up on this gem. It's one of those books you either love or hate. I hated it in the beginning, loved it by end. Well, that's not completely accurate, I loved it way before the end, I just didn't know it yet.

The author weaves a fantastic story that is inherently chaotic with a horde of characters (I stopped counting after 30), constantly switching storylines and scenes (usually across impossible distances), and all the while providing a fountain of information that, as a normally attentive listener, I found myself constantly losing track of some of the litte details that can define a character.

I couldn't imagine reading the print version of this book without driving off a cliff in the process. The style that the book is written in is difficult, but ultimately quite satisfying.

Yes, there is a ton of action and battle scenes of all types. Yes there are cheesy romances, even between cyborgs, but hey, it is science fiction, what do you really expect!

Be patient, listen closely, and feed your stubborness, and you too will appreciate this complicated sci-fi work of art.

It's ok, not great.

The book started out gang busters, with the introduction of cyborgs, biobots and life in the Legion. About the middle of the book I lost interest. I must admit that I am not a Military Sci-Fi fan, so those that are, may love this book. It is hard for me to get into make believe wars, battles, and politics if the author has not made me care for the characters. Each chapter jumps quickly from one character to another, not giving enough time to build the character and make us root or not root for him/her/it.

Dietz shows a good imagination and reminds me of Kevin J. Anderson. I was also reminded a little of Neal Asher, although he is not quite as biologically crazy as Asher.

This was written in 1993, so if on sale I will listen to more of Dietz to see if his writing gets any better.

Excellent -- Perhaps one of the best SF I've ever

I just finished the 6th book (of the 8 written so far) and thought I'd go back and write a review of the first in the series. I have not read a great deal of military Sci-Fi, but even without regard to the genre this is a great read. The plot is clever and complex. The military and historical information on the French Foreign Legion is a lot of fun as well.

The oddest sensation as I read it, was that it seemed familiar. Although written years before the movie, if I were the author, I'd be a bit miffed by the movie Avatar -- since 80% of the movie came out of this book...and another 15% came out of subsequent books in the series. (It is hard to tell if it was copied, or whether these are inevitable themes -- but it made me feel sorry for this author.)

If you like series books, such as the Lost Fleet series, or just a good adventure in space story -- this is a wonderful book.

Dietz Does

First Dietz book I have read...not bad at all. Great military Sci-Fi...good story. The narriation was very good. It is very hard to detail a battle involving...say...the human race...but Dietz did well with his story, kept focus. Recomended.

Huh. That wasn't that bad. Wonder if there's more.

First off, this book probably won't scratch everyone's itch. If you're looking for a hard-mil-sci-fi procedural, this isn't it. If you're looking for a deep, affecting story, this probably isn't that either. It is squarely in the camp of B-Movie action schlock.

That said, it's darned good B-Movie action schlock.

The story isn't really the thing I found most compelling about this book, which is something I feel rather odd typing. Rather, I found that what I was really enjoying about the book was the setting. You can tell the author was having the time of his life world-building this thing and didn't really give a damn how crazy any of it sounds when you look at it on its own. But he runs away with it, and it all just kinda works.

I do have to ding the writing for two rather glaring faults, one more harmless than the other. First, and more forgivable is the sex scenes. I don't know if it's the writing itself, or if a slightly stronger narration might have helped them, (though my inclination is to blame the writing) but as is they are just unbearably awkward to listen to. Thankfully, there is only a handful of them and they don't last too long.

The second big ding, and this one is something I just can't let off the hook, is that the author has a terrible habit of having leaving critical plot points to occur off-screen and then pay bare lip-service to them later. Major battles, critical plot turns, major character deaths, and my personally most loathed, a major romantic/character trauma/redemption thing (Its weird, but you'll know it when you see it, and it could have been one of the best things in the book, or hell, even a whole book on its own) get great, loving set-ups, then we cut away to something else, and when we come back we're looking at the aftermath. It's like Dietz just forgot he actually had to write the pay-off scene. It's frustrating and unsatisfying, and it leaves you feeling like some of the best scenes in the entire book are just missing, and seriously questioning that "unabridged" label on the store-page.

The narrator delivers a solid, lively performance, and his voice fits the tone of the book overall rather well. I caught him seeming to forget what voice he used for a particular character a few times, but they were mostly minors, and I could forgive a slip-up or two. I also got a kick out of him doing his "Radio Voice" for the cyborgs. It sounds like he's cupping his fist in front of his mouth and holding his jaw sideways like you did when you were a kid. The only thing missing is the "kshhhk" sounds.

Like I said earlier, My experience of the book was positive, dispite the flaws and schlocky feel. That was mostly because I loved the joy and enthusiasm that went into the world-building, and found myself wanting to spend more and more time in this universe. I can only really hope he learns in later entries to the series that he can't get away with leaving the climax out of a major arc and then just telling us it happened somewhere off-screen.

Good military sci fi

If you like an updated and harder version of Robert Heinlein's military work mixed with a bit of space opera, then look no further. A bit derivative in parts, but generally well written. The rest of the series are in a similar vein and are consistent with the story line. Traditional sci fi with a few interesting alien species and "good guys" with flaws. A good read.

Passes the time, but far from great

Any additional comments?

OK so I finished the legion of the damned series. To me these are filler books that I listened to while I waited for more credits to arrive or a decent audible $5 sale to come up. I got the first one in a $5 sale and it was "good enough" for me to get through them.

It's not bad, but it's very dry. It's reads more like a text book than a novel. Character X did Y. Character A did B.

Basically it's more of a narration of events than a story. The events themselves are somewhat interesting, and the tech isn't too outlandish. You do have some issues like "with all this tech why are the battles so primitive?"

So basically if you can accept the belief that in the far flung future warfare has basically devolved to WW2 levels of sophistication + cyborgs then you can get a little bit of enjoyment from this series.

If your looking for a series of "can't put it down" novels then this isn't going to cut it.

It's filler material that passes the time. Plain and simple. Not terrible but certainly not great.