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mburnamfink 's review for:
Dauntless
by Jack Campbell
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.