Besides being an exciting story told well, this book should be interesting to all SF fans because it was the first real example of what we now call "Military SF." It predated Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" by several years. Jerry Pournelle was strongly influenced by reading this and other Beam Piper works. (I think it is no coincidence that a minor character in this book is named Col. Falkenberg!)

So many aspects of this book are repeated again and again in works by Pournelle, Weber, Drake, etc.: The story is told from the point of view of a dedicated military officer. Military hardware and methods are presented in convincing detail. Military rites and customs, the implicit trust and comradeship between military people, and the natural distrust between military and civilian authorities -- all are implicit to the plot. Military ways of thinking are forever contrasted to their civilian counterparts, so that the civvy ways of thought are shown to be hopelessly fuzzy-minded and soft-hearted, incapable of handling a crisis. Sexuality is repressed to the Boy-Scout level -- well, perhaps that's because it was published in the 1950s.

And above all, aliens are gorily slaughtered in numbers. Much of the fun and the punch to this narrative lies in the fact that it's OKAY to wreak bloody mayhem on enemies, if they are nonhuman and attacked you first. John Ringo is a recent author who uses exactly the same method to add "kick" to a narrative. Ringo's books seem always to be asking, how inventively can we waste a battalion of lizard-headed gooks?

Piper showed how to ask and answer that question first, here in ULLER, where you will find the original pattern for the plot styles of Ringo, Weber, Drake, et al.