3rd September 2023

Book three of the Lost Fleet series - a surprisingly compelling set of novels about realistically timed space travel and space battles.

There’s not a huge amount to say about the plot except that it’s more of the same, just with the fleet’s situation getting worse as they run low on supplies and their enemies get wiser to their new tactics.

I felt like this one dragged a little - and there’s a lot more sex than probably necessary to advance the character-based part of the plot.

A good distraction though, and I’m definitely planning to keep going through the rest of the series and see how things unfold.

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22nd January 2023

This book, the second in the Lost Fleet series, has been sat on my shelf for quite some years since I read the first novel, and I was really nervous about picking it up. Hard military sci-fi is not normally my thing.

And yet somehow immediately I fell into the flow of this novel and found it incredibly gripping. The narrative is not complex - we follow the fleet captain as he goes about the business of organising his mission - flipping between character moments inside his head, and epic space battles.

I really like how the space travel and combat feels very real - the author has clearly spent a lot of time considering the real physics of how spaceships and fleets would really move and communicate - and hasn’t cut corners with magic tech solutions but instead made them keep elements of the plot.

I will certainly try not to wait so long before book three.

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27th October 2019

Dauntless is the first book by Jack Campbell that I’ve read, and is the first book in the Final Empire series. It’s the tale of a war which has been raging for 100 years - and the return of a legendary Captain from the early days of the war, who finds himself somehow in command of a fleet on the back foot, attempting to return home.

It’s a great idea for a science fiction novel that marries a character out of time with a series of classic submarine-style space battles. The close alignment of the narrative with Captain Jack helps not only with exposition but with grounding the space stuff in a relatable character who ties the threads of the story together.

The world-building is well thought through, with lots of tantalising glimpses of more to come in the series - giving us just the amount we need to know for now while leaving the door open for lots more to explore in future novels - some of which I hope to pick up next week.

Probably the best military/space novel I’ve read - although my copy was littered with typos and other printing mistakes.

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