David Burkhead's Shiva's Whisper

Welcome to the fourth Day of Jimbo's Fifth Annual Memorial Day Weekened Event! Now, it was  supposed to  be over yesterday but due to extenuating circumstances (I accepted four books when I only meant to accept five and I fell asleep before writing a review on Saturday) it's going until tomorrow. Yeah, that whole counting thing, who needs that?

And for the record yes, I know that Memorial Day is for those that don't make it home, but I don't know of any Science Fiction or Fantasy authors that have fallen in the line of duty.

Today's book was written by David Burkhead. Burkhead David was a Cryptologic Linguist in the United States Air Force from 1981-1987. After leaving the service, he went back to school and got a degree in physics in 1997. He currently works for Atomic Force Microscopes and is a single father of a sixteen-year-old girl, four dogs and two ferrets. Also, after you buy his book you should read the author bio at the end. It's even more impressive.

As for the actual Review...

*looks over right shoulder*

*looks over left shoulder*

Hey...

Hey you, wanna know a secret? You do? Guess what?

I LOVE SPACE BATTLES!!!

Oops, that was kinda loud for a secret but I figured all of the people I don't want to know probably already do, so why go all subtle and stuff?

But anyway...

David Burkhead's Shiva's Whisper is pretty amazeballs. But I mean, only if you like action and adventure and by favorite chemical process, blowuptuation, which, I guess can also be a nuclear process but only if you get a chemist to enrich the uranium or plutonium for you.

By the way, don't ingest plutonium. One of the guys on the Manhattan Project did that and he didn't survive it. The only thing worse than having radiation pelt the outside of your body is having it attack you from the inside. That concludes today's Public Service Announcement.

So yeah, I really enjoyed Shiva's Whisper. The thing is it wasn't just the action sequences. Most of the story takes place among an alien species known as the Eres. They have a felinoid feel to them and a culture and especially a way of thinking that is alien enough to make the reader feel out of their element while still being close enough to human to be understandable.

The Eres are a warrior race, who see themselves as a race of hunters. Most of their idioms are related to hunting. This gives the reader a point of reference and is explained in-character by one of the Eres themselves at a couple of points during the book. Don't get me wrong, there are no David Weber type infodumps, but we get enough information to keep us pointed in the right direction.

The amount of backstory that is developed here is amazing. Shiva's Whisper is the first in a series, but I almost felt like I had missed something. There were entire wars fought and alliances negotiated long before the story starts. As much as I loved Shiva's Whisper I really want to read the prequels too. The problem here being that I'm not sure if there are any. Seriously though, it feels like there is. This is a really well thought out universe. I'll be returning to it soon. 

I like the mysterious enemy feel to this book as well. We're not sure how the bad guys got their tech or where they learned to fight in space, but they sure do want to tear things up. I can see their reasoning too. If I had been through what they've been through, I'd want to tear stuff up to protect my species as well if that's what it took. I want to know how they learned as quickly as they did though. Something doesn't quite add up here, but I'm sure we'll be getting some answers in the not-too-distant future.  Well, the story takes place in the distant future, but hopefully the next book will be here before then...

Oh, and the enemy is believable as a not-so-experienced-but-eager-to-learn adversary. I like the way they improve as time goes on. One gets the feeling that they're just beginning to tap their own potential and that's scary. Especially when you read that one part and realize that they can do that one thing that makes it easy for the other thing to happen.

That wasn't too spoilery, was it?

Of course, that's not the only mystery, but telling more would be spoiling. I am wondering though. I mean why did the ________ not ________ when the ______ ________? Right? Do you get where I'm coming from? If not, you haven't read the book yet. If you skip to the end of the review, there's this link there, and you can click it (you have to have your ads turned on for this page) and you can click it and go get the book and I'll get a cut of the money and it won't cost you anything and maybe I can buy a bigger bottle of Coke or something.

Yeah, I'm babbling. I do that. How have you not realized that by now?

At any rate, not all of the action takes place in deep space either. There's just something satisfying about a hunt conducted on foot with a boar spear. It really appeals to my atavistic side. There's another hunt too, but that would be spoiling. And, after all, what's better than a race that conducts a hunt before a meeting? I can't get enough of those guys.

On, and since I mentioned space battles I have to talk about them a bit. Shiva's Whisper features a ginormous furball bigger than pretty much anything I've seen or read outside of the Honorverse and probably just about equal in size to the Battle of Manticore if you're familiar. It was epic. The details of the universes are different and Burkhead's universe plays by different rules than Weber's but both are really well thought out and easy to follow. And if you've got a degree in history like little ol' me, Burkhead doesn't put as much of the math on the page and you don't have to go scrambling for a physics text and a calculator to try to parse it all out.

Indeed, one of the strengths of Shiva's Whisper is that it really is easy to follow. Burkhead treats his audience with respect and like adults but he doesn't like to talk down to us by making things hard to pronounce or adding unnecessarily contorted language. I mean, he's got all of these concepts that don't exist in the real world and instead of making up crazy words for them, or trying to translate easy to understand concepts into some crazy made-up foreign language just to make himself look cool (I'm looking at you Mercedes Lackey) he just tells you what's going on. I really like that.

So yeah, buy the book. Read the book. Love the book. Enjoy the comfortable, easy to follow language. Just don't get too comfortable. You don't know what might be coming next.

Bottom Line:4.75 out of 5 Bared Fangs

Shiva's Whisper
David Burkhead
Self Published, 2019

Shiva's Whisper is available for purchase at the following link: