War Dogs

Greg Bear wrote Eon, one of the great SF novels of the last thirty years. This isn't in that league, but it is a decent novel that has perhaps been done a disservice by its publishers. From the jacket and blurb, you would think it is a piece of bog standard military SF, a genre I have no interest in, but it turns out to be the kind of alien archaeology that is right up my street. A group of marines make a combat landing on Mars, it goes wrong, and they are left struggling to survive in the harsh Martian conditions, until they encounter a lone colonist with her own agenda. It's a good read, but very short and with an abrupt ending that is only forgivable if it turns out there's a second book on the way - but when this one is less than 300 pages of large type, I suspect the whole story could have been told in one volume. We'll have to see what Bear has planned.