2018 SF. A reporter and camera operator are embedded aboard a convoy
taking troops and supplies to the front lines. In space.
I found myself reminded of the writing of William H. Keith
(probably best known for the earliest BattleTech novels, but to my
mind the things he wrote in his own right are rather better). There
aren't beautiful descriptive moments, or terribly deep characters, or
intricate plots; but there is well-written action in which it's easy
to work out what's going on, and even if the characters are thin one
still cares about them and wants them to succeed.
The setup is very clearly a north Atlantic convoy; the enemy are
usiing "ghoster" ships, some kind of stealth device, to spring
ambushes with torpedoes, and the Navy escort has to find them and
fight them off. Since things have been going badly, a retired admiral
turned merchant captain is tapped for command, and there are indeed
problems of authority; what we see of this navy is much more about
going off looking for glorious battles than it is about keeping
discipline.
Meanwhile, our hero learns the specific habits of living aboard a
ship, fights off an assassin and survives various other attacks, and…
well, I'm not saying that adults don't engage in adolescent sexual
games, especially when under high pressure in a war zone, but this
aspect of things got rather more of the word count than I was
interested in reading as most of the women seem interested in sleeping
with our hero.
There's an odd split of approaches: most of the time, Griff is the
outsider having things explained to him by the experienced captain,
but he also has to be the big hero, so sometimes the captain is
stumped and Griff has to come up with the brilliant idea. (And this is
very much warfare by brilliant ideas rather than by hard slogging,
though admittedly we're not dealing with vessels and crews intended to
be combatants.) At one point he comes up with something (uvqr na
nagvznggre obzo va na rfpncr cbq sbe gur rarzl gb cvpx hc guvaxvat
vg'f gurve fcl) which I strongly suspect would be regarded as a war
crime on the basis of perfidy
(thanks, war crimes consultant!), but strangely nobody seems to be
concerned about that, and none of the victims will be alive to talk
about it anyway. The journalists are supposed to be officially
neutral, but nobody on either force is ever in any doubt that they're
entirely on the side of the Good Guys.
I did particularly like the way things weren't dragged to a stop for
infodumps; for example, nobody ever explains what a "ghoster" ship
actually is, because they're clearly the enemy, they work a bit like
submarines, and any further necessary information becomes clear from
context. Of course it would help to have read or watched other SF, but
I think that can be assumed as a kind of baseline knowledge these days
in anyone who's likely to pick up a book like this; and so for
example, we know there's bound to be some kind of FTL, and jump points
seem to be involved, but we don't have to have a full history of how
they were discovered and so on.
It's light; like Keith, or indeed like Glynn Stewart; Questus hasn't
written a book to Change The Way You Think About War. But it's a most
agreeable diversion.