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3.68 AVERAGE
3.68 AVERAGE
Not my type
As my title stated my taste on this book. I’m no fan of a sort of inner thoughts repeatedly. Plus, I think the beginning was rough and need a good polish. Even with the politics with the “fleet”, it is too weird. It doesn’t sit too well with me. And the whole generational difference is too dumb, especially in military maneuvers...if they can build a starship. Then they better know how to do a maneuver. Otherwise, just stay on the damn planet.
As my title stated my taste on this book. I’m no fan of a sort of inner thoughts repeatedly. Plus, I think the beginning was rough and need a good polish. Even with the politics with the “fleet”, it is too weird. It doesn’t sit too well with me. And the whole generational difference is too dumb, especially in military maneuvers...if they can build a starship. Then they better know how to do a maneuver. Otherwise, just stay on the damn planet.
Review 18 - The Lost Fleet book 1 Dauntless by Jack Campbell
This is a great book to start this series.
I enjoyed my reading of it but I will say that certain bits of the book we're slightly drawn out which could have been reduced.
The author has come up with a cast of very believable characters. I would like to have more coverage regarding the circumstances surrounding the main character in these books and his arrival in the timeline of the books.
I thought the space battles were very well thought out and did involve ideas of exactly how long it would take to cross a star system without breaking the speed of light.
I will be continuing the series in the near future. Look for further reviews of this series of books.
4*
****
This is a great book to start this series.
I enjoyed my reading of it but I will say that certain bits of the book we're slightly drawn out which could have been reduced.
The author has come up with a cast of very believable characters. I would like to have more coverage regarding the circumstances surrounding the main character in these books and his arrival in the timeline of the books.
I thought the space battles were very well thought out and did involve ideas of exactly how long it would take to cross a star system without breaking the speed of light.
I will be continuing the series in the near future. Look for further reviews of this series of books.
4*
****
This is the first book of a six part series, the series starts very strong and seems to run out of ideas about book 4.
Overall I liked it, the author (John G. Hemry, writing under the pseudonym Jack Campbell) really knows how to make a space battle interesting. He has a very strict set of physics he follows, which does not allow FTL during battles. He does allow FTL as a mechanism to quickly move between star systems, but once in a star system .2 C is about as fast a ship can travel. This is fast enough to require relativistic effects to play a large part in battles. Hemry's experience with navel battles gives these books a much higher degree of realism than most other stories of space battles.
Unfortunately Hemry's ability to develop believable characters is nowhere near as good as his ability to vividly describe a space battle. His dialog is very redundant and predictable. This would make the books unreadable if there were not so many action sequences. I think that is why the final two books in the series are so bad. He simply ran out of combat and had to tie up the lose ends with his characters which was very difficult to get through.
Overall I liked it, the author (John G. Hemry, writing under the pseudonym Jack Campbell) really knows how to make a space battle interesting. He has a very strict set of physics he follows, which does not allow FTL during battles. He does allow FTL as a mechanism to quickly move between star systems, but once in a star system .2 C is about as fast a ship can travel. This is fast enough to require relativistic effects to play a large part in battles. Hemry's experience with navel battles gives these books a much higher degree of realism than most other stories of space battles.
Unfortunately Hemry's ability to develop believable characters is nowhere near as good as his ability to vividly describe a space battle. His dialog is very redundant and predictable. This would make the books unreadable if there were not so many action sequences. I think that is why the final two books in the series are so bad. He simply ran out of combat and had to tie up the lose ends with his characters which was very difficult to get through.
This book was ok. Just seemed very... simple.
The dialogue was straightforward, the twists and turns were predictable, the outcomes were expected, the vocabulary was basic.
All in all it just felt like a kids rollercoaster. Still pretty fun, but nothing unexpected or too exciting.
I almost want to keep reading the series just because, but I think I better not.
The dialogue was straightforward, the twists and turns were predictable, the outcomes were expected, the vocabulary was basic.
All in all it just felt like a kids rollercoaster. Still pretty fun, but nothing unexpected or too exciting.
I almost want to keep reading the series just because, but I think I better not.
Nothing amazing, rather mediocre for a book with space battles. The inner dialog felt like it was used as a device to explain something to the reader constantly, which became quite annoying at times.
I'd heard that The Lost Fleet is the (relatively) new hotness in milSF, and I wasn't disappointed. Campbell drops you into the heart of the action. Captain "Black Jack" Geary is a relic from the start of a very long war, rescued from a drifting cryopod by a fleet that in the intervening years has turned him into a Hero (capital H) and figure of speech. When an audacious sneak attack goes horrifically awry and the senior officers of the Alliance fleet are executed, Geary is put in command of a fleet a century removed from his time, with a mission of getting as many people home as possible. All of this happens in the first ten pages, and the rest of book is a rocket, with two battles and lots of thoughts about the differences between Geary and the diminished modern officers. A century of grinding attrition have eliminate the finely grained tactical skill and honor the characterized Geary's era, and he has to build those traditions back up. A lot of milSF plays with perception and reality of command, but Campbell turns it to 11 by making Geary have to live up, or at least around, his insane reputation.
That said, I do have a couple of strikes. First, this book is weak on description. I have no idea what the setting looks like or feels like, aside from a universal religion of ancestor worship. Secondary characters and ships are introduced mostly to be blown away; Geary has only a few more allies at the end of the book than he does at the beginning. Second, while Campbell is studious in making his space-navy make tactical sense, introducing communications lag over light-seconds and relativistic effects, he never specifies the acceleration of his ships, the core measure of a spaceship's performance. The ships seem to recapitulate the classes and capabilities of a Jutland-era Dreadnoughts and auxiliaries, rather than working from some sort of first principles on weapons and defenses. Finally, I'm not sure if I buy the sociology of the 'fleet in collapse.' Military organizations are somewhat of a hobby of mine, and while grinding attrition warfare can really erode the morale and command skills of a force (see the US post 1970, France after 1916, or the Imperial Japanese Navy in 1944), it also clears away deadweight paper-pushing officers and teaches the skills necessary to survive battle by default. These late war forces are often crude and demoralized, but they can be very very effective.
I'll be interested to see where this series goes.
That said, I do have a couple of strikes. First, this book is weak on description. I have no idea what the setting looks like or feels like, aside from a universal religion of ancestor worship. Secondary characters and ships are introduced mostly to be blown away; Geary has only a few more allies at the end of the book than he does at the beginning. Second, while Campbell is studious in making his space-navy make tactical sense, introducing communications lag over light-seconds and relativistic effects, he never specifies the acceleration of his ships, the core measure of a spaceship's performance. The ships seem to recapitulate the classes and capabilities of a Jutland-era Dreadnoughts and auxiliaries, rather than working from some sort of first principles on weapons and defenses. Finally, I'm not sure if I buy the sociology of the 'fleet in collapse.' Military organizations are somewhat of a hobby of mine, and while grinding attrition warfare can really erode the morale and command skills of a force (see the US post 1970, France after 1916, or the Imperial Japanese Navy in 1944), it also clears away deadweight paper-pushing officers and teaches the skills necessary to survive battle by default. These late war forces are often crude and demoralized, but they can be very very effective.
I'll be interested to see where this series goes.
Spaceships and rayguns! I enjoyed this a lot because I love military sci-fi but most of the books I read in this genre are too full of technobabble. This one has Black Jack Geary, a sort of Buck Rogers/John Crichton character who is frozen and thawed 100 years later to find his fleet fighting a war while forgetting how to fight to win. This has fun yet one-dimensional characters and left me wanting to read its sequel.
Revered as a hero by the Alliance, Captain John "Black Jack" Geary was thought lost in battle against the Syndics, a battle he helped win against enormous odds. But a century later and just when they need him again, his lifepod is discovered by an Alliance fleet caught in the middle of a Syndic trap and in peril of being wiped out.
As the starter for a space war series, this is an excellent story so far. We have the good guys, the Alliance, and the bad guys, the Syndics, both caught in an unending and possibly unwinnable war that is grinding both sides down. When Black Jack Geary is revived, he's seen as the hero that he had no idea he was. He was just doing his job so he finds it hard to live up to the hero worship model and just wants to get on with the task at hand.
The space battle tactics, where everything is travelling at close to light speed, are very well thought out as are the descriptions accompanying them. With only a few characters fleshed out, it's not overly heavy on that side as some space epics are but there's enough going on to keep the focus on the action and I expect we'll get more chatacters added as the tales unroll.
I'm looking forward to reading the next story in line.
As the starter for a space war series, this is an excellent story so far. We have the good guys, the Alliance, and the bad guys, the Syndics, both caught in an unending and possibly unwinnable war that is grinding both sides down. When Black Jack Geary is revived, he's seen as the hero that he had no idea he was. He was just doing his job so he finds it hard to live up to the hero worship model and just wants to get on with the task at hand.
The space battle tactics, where everything is travelling at close to light speed, are very well thought out as are the descriptions accompanying them. With only a few characters fleshed out, it's not overly heavy on that side as some space epics are but there's enough going on to keep the focus on the action and I expect we'll get more chatacters added as the tales unroll.
I'm looking forward to reading the next story in line.
Dans ce premier roman de ce qui est manifestement une série d'authentique space-op militariste, on découvre une flotte de l'Alliance (les gentils) qui tombent bêtement (ou courageusement) dans le piège tendu par la flotte des Syndics (les méchants).
La flotte étêtée par une manoeuvre aussi cruelle que peu loyale des Syndics se trouve alors un nouvel amiral en la personne de Black Jack Geary, rescapé d'une capsule d'hibernation qui lui a permis de sauter cent ans dans le futur, pour voir la guerre qu'il avait entamée continuer à faire rage ... oui, moi aussi, cette partie-là m'a fait frémir. Cet amiral doit alors permettre à sa flotte de survivre, rentrer au pays, et accessoirement faire du mal à son adversaire. Et ce premier tome démontre qu'il sait bien faire les trois choses.
Bon, vous l'avez compris, ce Black Jack Geary est une version masculinisée et un peu paumée d'Honor Harrington sur Grayson, avec toutefois la nuance que, venant d'un passé reculé (et apparemment plus honorable), ce capitaine nous permet de rentrer dans cette guerre sans pitié en douceur (tout en nous épargnant les états d'âmes redondants de la Salamandre). Du coup, on entre en douceur dans cette flotte spatiale elle aussi remplie de centaines de milliers d'hommes qui ne tiennent leur place que par la méfiance qu'entretiennent les politiques vis-à-vis des IAs. Ca pose une espèce de socle permettant la construction de ce récit initiatique, dans lequel la flotte se reconstruit dans la fuite.
Au milieu de tout ça, il y a bien sûr Black Jack Geary, héros légendaire, mais avant tout capitaine consciencieux. Et je dois dire que la confrontation des deux aspects de ce personnage est, je trouve, un peu plus pertinente que celle d'Honor qui assume assez mal son côté Salamandre. Ca donne un récit assez intéressant, parce Jack Geary est adulé par presque tout son équipage comme le héros légendaire qu'il est, et ca accentue également la solitude du pouvoir qu'il ne peut que ressentir, à la foi comme amiral, et comme héros revenu d'entre les morts à l'heure du jugement.
Du coup, l'un dans l'autre, ça se laisse lire (par la grâce également d'une écriture maîtrisée, même si manquant peut-être d'un je ne sais quoi de littéraire), mais je ne suis pas vraiment dupe : ça ne me fera certainement pas aimer la cause de militaires assez idiots pour aller goûter au vide sidéral par la grâce d'ordres données à des distances astronomiques. Lisez-le donc si vous aimez Honor Harringotn (pas Miles Vorkosigan : il est cent fois plus subtil que Geary ET Harrington réunis).
La flotte étêtée par une manoeuvre aussi cruelle que peu loyale des Syndics se trouve alors un nouvel amiral en la personne de Black Jack Geary, rescapé d'une capsule d'hibernation qui lui a permis de sauter cent ans dans le futur, pour voir la guerre qu'il avait entamée continuer à faire rage ... oui, moi aussi, cette partie-là m'a fait frémir. Cet amiral doit alors permettre à sa flotte de survivre, rentrer au pays, et accessoirement faire du mal à son adversaire. Et ce premier tome démontre qu'il sait bien faire les trois choses.
Bon, vous l'avez compris, ce Black Jack Geary est une version masculinisée et un peu paumée d'Honor Harrington sur Grayson, avec toutefois la nuance que, venant d'un passé reculé (et apparemment plus honorable), ce capitaine nous permet de rentrer dans cette guerre sans pitié en douceur (tout en nous épargnant les états d'âmes redondants de la Salamandre). Du coup, on entre en douceur dans cette flotte spatiale elle aussi remplie de centaines de milliers d'hommes qui ne tiennent leur place que par la méfiance qu'entretiennent les politiques vis-à-vis des IAs. Ca pose une espèce de socle permettant la construction de ce récit initiatique, dans lequel la flotte se reconstruit dans la fuite.
Au milieu de tout ça, il y a bien sûr Black Jack Geary, héros légendaire, mais avant tout capitaine consciencieux. Et je dois dire que la confrontation des deux aspects de ce personnage est, je trouve, un peu plus pertinente que celle d'Honor qui assume assez mal son côté Salamandre. Ca donne un récit assez intéressant, parce Jack Geary est adulé par presque tout son équipage comme le héros légendaire qu'il est, et ca accentue également la solitude du pouvoir qu'il ne peut que ressentir, à la foi comme amiral, et comme héros revenu d'entre les morts à l'heure du jugement.
Du coup, l'un dans l'autre, ça se laisse lire (par la grâce également d'une écriture maîtrisée, même si manquant peut-être d'un je ne sais quoi de littéraire), mais je ne suis pas vraiment dupe : ça ne me fera certainement pas aimer la cause de militaires assez idiots pour aller goûter au vide sidéral par la grâce d'ordres données à des distances astronomiques. Lisez-le donc si vous aimez Honor Harringotn (pas Miles Vorkosigan : il est cent fois plus subtil que Geary ET Harrington réunis).