Some time in the future, most major countries have space fleets and
interstellar colonies. Ark Royal is an outmoded carrier left in a
parking orbit, not broken up only because of her famous past, and her
captain's a drunken embarrassment. Then the aliens arrive, and blow
straight through the more modern fleet…
Ark Royal is military SF, reminiscent of some of Steve White's
books connected with the Starfire game. But mostly in a good way.
For a start, we've got real nations, most obviously the British,
rather than some generic "Terran Republic"; Nuttall's clearly read up
a bit on Royal Navy conventions and traditions, and it's pleasing to
see them rather than the US Navy transplanted into the distant future
(at one point the Captain is comforted by proper tea rather than the
dried stuff used in the Mess). All the same, the reinvented
Battlestar Galactica casts a long shadow over this book.
The technology doesn't really seem to have been thought out very far.
For a start, we have space fighters. Why? Well, it's never really
explained; it's a navy setup, so you have fighters, right? Most of the
SF community worked out a while ago that fighters only make sense at
sea because they're moving in a different medium from the carriers
they launch off, so they can go much faster. There's no attempt made
to justify them here.
The same applies to the spaceship technology. The normal-space drive
allows in-system travel pretty much without limit, so it's clearly
either reactionless or some highly efficient rocket, but fuel is never
a concern to the characters: they just push the button and it goes.
The FTL drive is similar to the Alderson Drive or the one in
Starfire (1.4.11 in
the Landis taxonomy):
you go to one of a small number of fixed points, turn on the drive,
and end up in a corresponding fixed point in the star system at the
other end of the "tramline". (The obvious corollary, that those fixed
points are where you station your defending ships, doesn't yet seem to
have occurred to the naval powers of this universe.)
The international situation isn't clearly described. Britain is
clearly a first-rate power in space, and the others that get mentioned
most are China and Russia; France and the USA get a bit of a look-in.
All right, I'll admit it, I was biased against the book when an early
page described a space station as "hanging in geostationary orbit over
Britain". If you don't know what a geostationary orbit is, and if you
can write that with a straight face you don't, then you have no
business using the words! There are other linguistic errors (like
bodies "ululating slightly as if they couldn't stay completely still")
which suggest that Nuttall doesn't have the love of language which I
associate with good authors. At one point someone even asks "can I
avoid this from happening again".
These ships have Jefferies Tubes just like the ones in Star Trek,
but fortunately that's the only major influence that show seems to
have had. They're protected with point defence and armour, not force
fields; they fight with missiles and mass drivers, not lasers. (Though
the aliens have "plasma" weapons. Yeah, that hasn't been plausible for
a while, if it ever was.)
As for characters, we have four viewpoints: Commodore Sir Theodore
Smith, who much like Ark Royal did something impressive in his youth
but has now taken to drinking away his days on a dead-end post;
Captain James Fitzwilliam, a young officer with family connections
who'd hoped to command Ark Royal but ends up as her executive
officer (oddly never called "Number One"); Kurt Schneider, a retired
fighter pilot called up out of the reserves; and Major Charles Parnell
of the Royal Marines. Smith and Schneider get the majority of the
attention, as Ark Royal single-handedly takes on the alien forces
and, thanks to some lucky coincidences of design evolution, does
rather better than anyone could have expected.
(I suspect that both Smith and Fitzwilliam are too highly ranked for
their jobs, but I don't know enough to say for certain.)
The characters aren't particularly subtly drawn, but the battle scenes
are reasonably gripping, and the tactics make a certain amount of
sense given the setup. The obligatory sex is not too obviously
pasted onto the side of the plot. The aliens are oddly un-alien, at
least in their approaches to ship design and combat, though their
motives and strategic goals remain a mystery.
The book covers the initial moves in Ark Royal's war, one mission to
head off a possible attack on Earth and a second to investigate what
happened to one of the colonies that got hit. At the end, the war's
not over, and Nuttall asks readers to comment if they want to see a
sequel.
It's a surprisingly hard one to call. By most of the criteria by which
I usually judge books (worldbuilding, plot, characterisation), it's a
failure. And yet, it has a sense of fun and enthusiasm which carries
it over the worst of the problems.
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