History Literature / OutOftheDark

%%* AuthorAvatar: Dave Dvorak and his wife Sharon Dvorak both live in David and Sharon Weber's hometown.

%%* BoomHeadshot: Lots. And other forms of LudicrousGibs too.

%%* CombatPragmatist: Surprisingly, the Shongairi are even more pragmatic than the human guerrilla fighters. (See HumansAreMorons below.) Of course the end result is that humans just get more insanely pissed off.

** The Liatu call the Tairyonians, the native sapient species of a planet they invated, "Nuisance Animals".

* ReluctantRuler: [[spoiler:Dave Dvorak becomes this after "Clan Dvorak" defeats Clan Qwern, thereby becoming the new ruling dynasty of the Qwer-- Dvorakian Empire. This allows him to sign the agreement to join the alliance with Earth. While he could have refused rulership, the result would've been chaos caused by a lack of succession. When he meets Vlad in the third book, he has three Sarthian bodyguards following him at all times, wearing the tartan kilts of the Scottish Clan Gunn, of all things.]]

* WhenAllYouHaveIsAHammer: The Shongairi's trump card is their orbital firepower, which they use in lieu of effective ground forces. Whenever someone resists on the ground, the Shongairi orbital forces bomb them, or the nearest town within three or four miles. They don't seem to get that this is just making things worse. This is reinforced by Shongairi pack-based psychology, which tells them that the best way to force compliance is by bombing targets to demonstrate superiority, but [[HumanityIsInsane those insane humans]] just keep on fighting.

* LightspeedLeapfrog: [[spoiler:Vlad and the vampires]] spend all of the second novel flying to the Shongairi homeworld at roughly 6 times the speed of light, taking them about 40 years. Just as they're preparing to repay the Shongairi for their attack on Earth, they detect a massive spindle-shaped vessel gaining on them at an unbelievable acceleration. [[spoiler:Then Dave Dvorak contacts Vlad from his brand-new ship that has left Earth 6 years ago and has actually beaten them there by a month. And she's not alone -- there's a fleet of nineteen ships, ranging from transport and supply ships to enormous superdreadnoughts.]]

* SpaceStation: The space platform ''Bastion'' is built not long after the founding of the Planetary Union in order to house the seat of PU government, as doing it anywhere on Earth's surface would result in accusations of favoritism to a particular member state. The platform is home to the PU Congress, the Terra House (the residency of the president), the Citadel (the PU's version of the Pentagon), and the people who make it all work, so it's grown to a decent-sized city and is constantly in the process of being expanded.

* ReluctantRuler: [[spoiler:Dave Dvorak becomes this after "Clan Dvorak" defeats Clan Qwern, thereby becoming the new ruling dynasty of the [[strike:Qwernian]] Dvorakian Empire. This allows him to sign the agreement to join the alliance with Earth. While he could have refused rulership, the result would've been chaos caused by a lack of succession. When he meets Vlad in the third book, he has three Sarthian bodyguards following him at all times, wearing the tartan kilts of the Scottish Clan Gunn, of all things.]]

* ReluctantRuler: [[spoiler:Dave Dvorak becomes this after "Clan Dvorak" defeats Clan Qwern, thereby becoming the new ruling dynasty of the ~~Qwernian~~ Dvorakian Empire. This allows him to sign the agreement to join the alliance with Earth. While he could have refused rulership, the result would've been chaos caused by a lack of succession. When he meets Vlad in the third book, he has three Sarthian bodyguards following him at all times, wearing the tartan kilts of the Scottish Clan Gunn, of all things.]]

* PoweredArmor: In the first part of the second book, powered armor is being developed under the name [[Creator/RobertHeinlein Project]] [[Literature/StarshipTroopers Heinlein]].

* AliensAreBastards: The Shongairi and the Hegemony are condescending about those they see as lesser species and have no compunctions about exploiting them or being complicit to genocide.

* TheRightOfASuperiorSpecies: The aliens usually do this successfully but get way more than they bargained for with humanity.

Expanded from a short story of Creator/DavidWeber that first appeared in Creator/GeorgeRRMartin and Gardner Dozois's anthology Warriors (2010), ''Out of the Dark'', released the same year, is a series known for its unusual take on military science fiction.

In the very near future, Earth has been targeted for colonization by a galactic empire known as the Hegemony. Deemed "lunatic local sentients" by a survey team that witnessed [[UsefulNotes/TheHouseOfPlantagenet King Henry V]] and his troops [[UsefulNotes/TheHundredYearsWar slaughtering the French at Agincourt]], humankind has essentially been written off as [[BarbarianTribe bloodthirsty, backwater barbarians]] that no one will particularly miss. It's TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt. Technologically superior, carnivorous, [[IntelligentGerbil canine-analog aliens]] have [[AlienInvasion invaded Earth]] with the intention of killing most of us and enslaving the rest. [[LetsGetDangerous Things don't go according to plan]].

* AmbitionIsEvil: The Shongari hope to harvest Earth's scientists and recourses to give them the power to move against the rest of the Hegemony.
** Averted with Colonel Sanders, who desperately wants to get promoted to general, but only to put a stop to the jokes about his name.
* AlienArtsAreAppreciated: The Shongairi vehicle operators are very grateful for Human made roads after the prehistory planets they've gone to before.
* AlienInvasion: The whole plot of the book. I mean, just look at the summary.

* AlternativeCalendar: Various chapters provide the date in both the Gregorian and the galactic standard calendar. The epilogue introduces a third calendar, replacing the Hegemony's calendar with the notation [[spoiler:"Year 1 of the Terran Empire"]].

* AndThisIsFor: When Mircea finally lets Buchevsky have his revenge by [[spoiler:executing Thikair]], he states that this is for his daughters, who were killed in the pre invasion orbital strikes.
* ApocalypseHow: The Shongairi start off with a plan to only go up to a Class 2 and enslave the survivors but switches to a Class 3a when the invasions forces are getting chewed up on the ground. The second novel expands on the aftermath, with isolated pockets of survivors all across the world desperately trying to survive, with the winter coming and little food, shelter, or medicine available, while warlords and criminals use the opportunity to establish their own fiefdoms. The largest stable governments are North Carolina, Saskatchewan, and one of Brazilian states.

* CanadaEh: In the second book, Canada is revealed to be one of the nations to suffer least in the Western Hemisphere, alongside US and Brazil. With Saskatchewan surviving relatively unscathed, it becomes the new seat of government. Canada is the first to accept President Howell's offer of forming the Continental Union.

* GenreShift: The genre shift doesn't take place near the end, resulting in a cry of TwistEnding or DeusExMachina. The issue is though the novel's expansion of the story is entirely before the events, resulting in 90% in the first genre of hard sci-fi alien invasion. The last 10% however involves [[spoiler:Dracula]].

** There are some implications that parts of the Hegemony might have picked up from the scouting report that humans could be actually dangerous (and not just ''potentially'' dangerous if allowed to develop), and let the Shonghairi on Earth in the expectation that the Shonghairi might expend more resources than gained. They did, alright. [[spoiler: To the point that the novel ends with the year noted as Year 1 of the Terran Empire.]]

%%* GunPorn: '''Oh, yes...''' The other thing the book is criticized for after the TwistEnding.

* HigherTechSpecies: The Shongairi technology is ''very'' carefully calibrated to be just advanced enough to avert a CurbStompBattle—and permit [[HumansAreWarriors humanity to show what determined and gallant warriors we are]]—while still ensuring the eventual outcome will not be in our favor, necessitating the DeusExMachina in the TwistEnding. Also, due to a quirk of human psychology, we're the only species that has ever reached our current tech level without world peace and thus to invent things like modern stealth fighters. They're far higher tech but are just kitted out for the wrong war and could dominate us if they weren't. They still hold the top of the gravity well and have better bioweapons and cyber-warfare tech.

** [[spoiler:Neural education gives humanity what it needs to commandeer Shongairi capitol and construction ships and begin the GenocideBackfire.]]
** The puppies fail to realize that wiping out all of Earth's capitols leaves no one to tell their military and civilians to stand down, not understanding that we wouldn't find it self-evident. The Shongairi also failed to realize that revealing their presence by bombing the hell out of mankind and demanding surrender without offering any sort of incentive to surrender (beyond "we'll bomb you more") was likely to result in a lot of mankind just getting pissed.

%%* HopelessWar: [[IWillFightSomeMoreForever We don't care, though]].

* HumansAdvanceSwiftly: We've advanced three times faster than the fastest known race (which advanced twice as fast as the next best), and no one can figure out why such a warlike species hasn't blown itself up yet. The Shongairi actually intended to take advantage of this, putting humans to work in their R&D labs as well as using them as shock troops. [[spoiler:Then we jack the Shongairi's neural educators, and the end of the novel implies we're getting prepped to eventually return the favor.]]
** The second book expands on this and proposes several explanations for why that's the case. For one, the Hegemony is dominated by herbivore species, whose mindset was that technology should help protect them from predators instead of finding better ways to hunt prey. This means that after a certain point, there's really no need to advance at a breakneck pace. This mindset seems to propagate even to omnivores and carnivores in the Hegemony, since they're in the minority. Additionally, pretty much all races in the Hegemony have a PostScarcityEconomy, limitless energy, and [[WeWillHavePerfectHealthInTheFuture perfect health]] that allows the to live for centuries. All those factors result in them designing technology to last for a ''long'' time and viewing change in a negative light. As a consequence, they're not used to having to repair broken stuff as much as we are. And when things don't break, there's no need to innovate. Humans of the 21st century are used to the mentality of "next year's model will be better" and planned obsolescence. The Hegemony races have no such views. The galactic culture's advancement curve has plateaued around 150,000-100,000 years ago. In contrast, humanity's curve continues to rise. When engineers and scientists get their hands on some specs of Shongairi tech, they're shocked at how overengineered everything is (to the point of having a piece of equipment be 5 times larger than it has to be due to all the redundancy). The engineers' immediate reaction is to scale back on the redundancy to something that is still acceptable by human standards (but would be unforgivably risky to the aliens) to miniaturize the components. And some applications of tech are either absent (any form of AI) or are deliberately suppressed (artificial gravity on ships).

* HumansAreMorons: The Shongairi are initially convinced of this, based on "idiotic tactics" from Agincourt, and a further convinced of it once they understand the current situation. For example, they believe that the refusal of First World powers to use nuclear or biological weapons against their enemies in the Middle East is idiotic (specifically citing the US' tolerance of Iran's actions) and the presence of a public information network like the Internet, allowing free, ready access to vast stores of information, is considered completely insane.
** The whole reason the aliens want to kill us is because they believe we're mindlessly violent and would lash out uncontrolled against other species. The Shongairi are think we're stupid for not using weapons of mass destruction against the Middle Eastern populations to kill off the terrorists, regardless of the ecological damage and the countless innocents who would die horribly.

%%* ImmuneToBullets: [[spoiler:The vampires.]]

* IntelligentGerbil: The two alien species described in the novel resemble dogs and cattle.

** Dropping a MeteorOfDoom is a cheap way to soften up a future colony. Plus, the Shongairi have effective energy weapons on their heavy assault vehicles but mostly rely on mediocre conventional firearms. Human firearms and artillery become the stuff of nightmares for them.

%%* TheMole: [[spoiler:Governor Howell.]]

** The Shongairi are confused that humanity managed to get to our current level of advancement without becoming this. [[spoiler:It's starting to shape up in the sequel, as the governor of North Carolina seeks to unite all the human survivors under a single federal government modeled after the US (bicameral legislature, state-appointed senators, electoral college, etc.) in order to rebuild Earth and prepare for round 2 against the Hegemony in a few decades' time. By year 15 after the invasion, the Planetary Union of Earth consists of most of the nations, including US, Canada, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, UK, Spain, both Italies (which split into Padania and Sicily), Portugal, Romania, India, and South Africa. Switzerland is on the fence, trying to lobby for "associated status", although President Howell makes it clear that it's either in or out, no middle ground. And Pakistan has become a hotbed of radical Islam and steadfastly refuses to join, as the Planetary Union constitution includes clauses for fundamental human rights, which the Pakistani leaders are vehemently against.]]
** Averted with the Sarthians, who are at about the 1930s-1940s level of technology. They still have plenty of nation-states, but the two dominant ones are the Republic of Dianto and the Qwernian Empire. The others tend to be members of one of the two blocs. The humans compare them to Athens and Sparta of Ancient Greece. The Dianteans are a lot more like the humans in terms of their politics and values. They revere the rule of law. They are an island nation with a powerful navy. The Qwernian, meanwhile, have a strong warrior tradition and scoff at laws, preferring custom and tradition over the written word. They have a powerful army and control lots of natural resources, but their navy is lacking. The humans are adamant that they wish for the Sarthians to establish some kind of supranational governing body in order to help distribute the human technology equally.

%%* RebelLeader: Mircea Basarab.

** The war against the Shongairi becomes this as so as it is confirmed that we can fight back and that they have landed on Earth.

* SequelHook: The end of the book makes it clear that [[spoiler:since we got decades until the Hegemony realizes the Shongairi haven't responded back to them, Humanity plans on bringing the fight to them with captured Shongairi tech.]]

* TakeThat: The author does not have a good opinion on the [[CoolPlane F-35 Lightning II]] as shown during a scene where an F-22 Raptor pilot is criticizing it... [[CasualDangerDialog while shooting down alien dropships.]]

%%* TheUnmasquedWorld: Once [[spoiler:the vampires appear.]]

* VirtueIsWeakness: The stated opinion of the Liatu where other, non-Liatu, species are concerned. Any species, like humans for example, who actually care about well-being and humane treatment of races besides their own must be of inferior intelligence.

%%* WolfMen: The Shongairi themselves.

* MacrossMissileMassacre: In the third novel, [[spoiler:each ''Relentless''-class superdreadnought has 2700 missile launchers and can bring two-thirds of them on any firing arc. If every one of those missiles has a Mjölnir bomb-pumped laser warhead, that can potentially mean over 27,000 lasers delivered at point-blank range on a target. And Dave brought four of these superdreadnoughts to the Shong System]].

* HonorBeforeReason: The Shongairi follow a strict honor code called "Jukaris" that has been compared to bushido. After studying it extensively, Dave comes to the conclusion that [[spoiler:Thikair acted of his own volition, and his actions would likely be seen by most Shongairi as dishonorable (by attacking without announcing himself or allowing humans the chance to fight back; also by killing women and children rather than warriors). That is why he rushes the newly-built fleet to the Shong System in order to beat Vlad there and stop him from laying waste to the Shongairi homeworld. His goal is instead to force the Shongairi to submit to Earth (as is normal for a Shongairi "beta" to submit to a stronger "alpha") and become their allies in the coming war against the Hegemony]].

* FantasticRacism: Within the Hegemony, between carnivores and herbivores/omnivores. The Shongairi have nothing but contempt for humanity as well, at least at first.

** The entire Hegemony, but the Liatu in particular as the only Founding Race that humanity has had knowing contact with, appear to view less technologically spaient species as lesser. Their "Improper Use of Planitary Resources" is the justification used for displacing, enslaving, genetically modifying or outright exterminating planitary natives who can't match their technology.
** In the case of the Tairyonians, [[StupidityInducingAttack who were stripped of their intelligence during the invasion]], Howel literally equates the Liatu's views to those of the Nazis.

* LightspeedLeapfrog: [[spoiler:Vlad and the vampires]] spend all of the second novel flying to the Shongairi homeworld at roughly 6 times the speed of light, taking them about 40 years. Just as they're preparing to repay the Shongairi for their attack on Earth, they detect a massive spindle-shaped vessel gaining on them at an unbelievable acceleration. [[spoiler:Then Dave Dvorak contacts Vlad from his brand-new ship that has left Earth 6 years ago and has actually beaten them there by a month. And she's not alone -- there's a fleet of sixteen ships, ranging from transport and supply ships to enormous superdreadnoughts.]]

* ThisIsUnforgivable: Absolutely no one on Earth will even consider helping the Shongairi thanks to their repeated orbital bombardment and the billions of human deaths. The Shongairi discovering this (which is completely incomprehensible to their own pack-based instincts to not bear grudges over defeats and demonstrations of superiority,) is what prompts them to decide they're better off exterminating humanity completely, having finally realised that a planet full of bereaved humans will drive themselves extinct in a war of eternal vengeance before sincerely submitting.

Expanded from a short story of Creator/DavidWeber that first appeared in Creator/GeorgeRRMartin and Gardner Dozois's anthology Warriors (2010), ''Out of the Dark'', released the same year, is a novel known for its unusual take on military science fiction.

'''If you don't want to spoil the ending, don't scroll down to the Index list at the bottom of this page, or even glance at the review page.''' The sequel, called ''Into the Light'' (coauthored by Chris Kennedy), was released on January 12th, 2021, after more than a decade in DevelopmentHell. The third novel, ''To Challenge Heaven'' was released on January 16th, 2024.

* FantasticRacism: Within the Hegemony, between carnivores and herbivores/omnivores. The Shongairi have nothing but contempt for humanity as well, at least at first. [[spoiler:The revelation of the vampires makes a lot of mankind...''uncomfortable''.]]

* FantasticSlurs: The Shongairi use "weed-eater" as an epithet for the members of the Hegemony and Humanity calls the Shongairi "puppies."

* MacrossMissileMassacre: In the third novel, [[spoiler:each ''Relentless''-class superdreadnought has 2700 missile launchers and can bring two-thirds of them on any firing arc. If every one of those missiles has a Mjölnir bomb-pumped laser warhead, that can potentially mean over 27,000 lasers delivered at point-blank range on a target. And Dave brought four of these superdreadnoughts to the Shong System]].

* MacrossMissileMassacre: In the third novel, [[spoiler:each ''Relentless''-class superdreadnought has 2700 missile launchers and can bring two-thirds of them on any firing arc. If every one of those missiles has a Mjölnir bomb-pumped laser warhead, that can potentially mean over 27,000 lasers delivered at point-blank range on a target]].

* GreenAesop: A minor example. Apparently, the Shongairi value prime grazing lands as food for their food animals. So they do their best to avoid polluting the environment. When they saw that humanity was still heavily using fossil fuels despite developing nuclear power, they're shocked. It may have contributed to Thikair's decision to [[spoilers:attempt genocide of humanity]].