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Unfortunately, too many unresolved "loose ends", and it seems this is the last of the series? The ending offers the opportunity for a whole new path - hopefully "Berserkers" can be syndicated for others to pick up the thread and run with it. For example, does the Builder or its ship have the software key to overwrite Berserker's malevolent programming? Will humans and Builders interbreed?

What new technologies can be found in the Builder ship? Will humans accept a Builder alliance or view it as a Berserker trick? Lots of opportunity from this plot.

Hopefully some of it will be realized. This novel is without reservation the best Berserker story yet. Full of many plot twists and surprises.

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Highly recommended to Berserker story lovers and everyone else that likes science fiction or speculative fiction. Fred was paid by the word. The concepts put forth in this novel are smothered by this lengthy and almost boring style. The same dialogue is repeated over and over and over. I thought it must be a misprint, a broken press, what a lack of style, a Hemingway stuck in first gear. I thought the reader me would die before the Berserker.

Buy for others

One person found this helpful. I had the full series once upon a time and it got lost in a few moves. This is an excellent SciFi series that had helped me get started in the joys of reading. If you haven't given the series a chance I would recomend giving it a shot.

I'm not as enamoured of the berderker series as i am of S. Tension and suspense right up to the end, with plenty of weighty material to ponder after you finish.

The Berserker Throne

The berserker series, from begining to end, was very enjoyable. I was a little sad to see it end. Over the years, I have read many great things about the Berserker series. Fleets of giant unmanned war ships visit a human planet, sterilize it of all life, and then go on to another inhabited planet. If challenged by a human fleet trying to defend a planet, the Berserker fleet uses any tactic necessary to destroy the human fleet, regardless of losses, and uses both robot boarding parties and kamikaze attacks.

Eventually, the surviving human planets fought the Berserker fleets to a temporary standstill. I'd rather face the Borg from the Star Trek series. This book starts with a great concept and an intriguing mystery. Near a large unexplored nebula, humans have built a space lab that contains nearly a billion human zygotes to be used on a new colony planet.

The lab is currently orbiting a small inhabited planetoid. A single Berserker ship comes out of the nebula, approaches the space lab, and destroys all the lab's defenders, both small human warships and the defense installations on the planetoid. But instead of destroying the space lab and sterilizing the planetoid and the other inhabited worlds in the system, it simply captures the space lab and begins to tow it back into the nebula.


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Why is this Berserker acting so strangely compared to all previously known Berserkers? The first half of the book is told from the point of view of an unsympathetic character and is excessively long and redundant. The second half of the book is told from the point of view of a hateful character and is also long and repetitive. See all 15 reviews. Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers.

Learn more about Amazon Giveaway. Set up a giveaway. What other items do customers buy after viewing this item? Customers who viewed this item also viewed. Berserker Saberhagen's Berserker Series Book 1. There's a problem loading this menu right now.

The Berserker Throne (Berserker, book 7) by Fred Saberhagen

Learn more about Amazon Prime. Get fast, free shipping with Amazon Prime. Get to Know Us. English Choose a language for shopping. Not Enabled Word Wise: Enabled Amazon Best Sellers Rank: Amazon Music Stream millions of songs. Amazon Advertising Find, attract, and engage customers. Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon. Alexa Actionable Analytics for the Web. The Berserker stories published as novels and short stories depict the fight between Berserkers and the sentient species of the Milky Way Galaxy: Homo sapiens referred to as "Earth-descended" or "ED" humans, or as "Solarians" is the only sentient species aggressive enough to counter Berserkers.

The first story, "Without a Thought" , was basically a puzzle story, whose protagonist must find a way to simulate intelligence to fool an enemy trying to determine whether there was any conscious being present in a spaceship. Saberhagen came up with the Berserker as the rationale for the story on the spur of the moment, but the basic concept was so fruitful, with so many possible ramifications, that he used it as the basis of many stories.

A common theme in the stories is of how the apparent weaknesses and inconsistencies of living beings are actually the strengths that bring about the killer machines' eventual defeat. The second story, "Goodlife" , introduces human traitors or collaborators who cooperate with the Berserker machines to stay alive for a little longer. The original Berserkers were designed and built as an ultimate weapon , by a race now known only as the Builders, to wipe out their rivals, the Red Race, in a war which took place at a time corresponding to Earth's Paleolithic era.

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The Builders failed to ensure their own immunity from Berserker attack, or they lost those safeguards through an unknown malfunction that changed the Berserker programming, and they were exterminated by their own creation very shortly after the demise of the Red Race. The Berserkers then set out across the galaxy to fulfill their core programmed imperative, which is now, simply, to destroy all life wherever they can find it.

A similar premise, though on a much smaller scale, was previously introduced by Walter M. The Berserker stories features many different characters originating from many different species, human and alien. The Berserkers are intelligent machines, created by an organic race in the past as a doomsday weapon, a group of robots with one goal: Berserkers exist in a multitude of shapes, sizes and forms.

The most common Berserkers are large spherical interstellar spacecraft, heavily armed and armored, equipped with self-replicating factories, and capable of producing numerous scout craft, foot soldiers, and other weapons of war. Little is known of the Berserkers' history other than that they were created to destroy the Red Race, who are now extinct.

The creators of the Berserkers are known as the Builders, who were also later destroyed by the Berserkers. The Builders were a precursor race , of whom little is known other than they created and were later destroyed by the Berserkers.

Saberhagen describes them thus:. And of the Builders themselves, their own all-too-effective weapons, the berserkers, had left nothing but a few obscure records—video and voice recordings. Those videos had recorded slender, fine-boned beings, topologically like Solarian humans with the sole visible exception of the eye, which in the Builder species was a single organ, stretching clear across the upper face, with a bright bulging pupil that slid rapidly back and forth.

In most of the ancient Builder graphics, no matter how elegantly enhanced, the berserkers' creators showed as hardly more than stick drawing of orange glowing substance. Now for the first time in history it was plain to Solarian eyes that that orange color and brightness were the result of some kind of clothing, the exposed skin being a dullish yellow where it showed on the face, the four-fingered hands, and across part of the chest.

The Builders created the Berserkers in a genocidal war with the Red Race, which ended in both races' extinction by the Berserkers. The Red Race was another precursor race, of which little is known other than that their extinction was the Builders' purpose in creating the Berserkers millennia ago. The Carmpan are a patient and peaceful species; their culture is one of logic, reason, pacifism, and philosophy. They lend what support they can to the Humans, but in non-martial forms. They are incapable of direct aggression, but they do possess one special power, a telepathic ability to speak to other sentients across the stars, a method of communication that the Berserkers cannot spy on.

Their most effective help to ED Earth Descended Solarians is the 'Prophecy of Probability' in which they can give information on future events.