Second of a six-book series. In the distant future, a long-frozen
space-navy captain tries to lead his fleet home.
More of the same. Three more star systems along the fleet's
route, and a slight feeling of progress.
It's becoming clear that the Syndics, the principal opposition here,
have been taking the same stupid pills as the Alliance. Their ship
commanders don't dare to surrender because they know they'll be
executed if they do, and even if they might there are remote overrides
built into the ships anyway.
Technologically, the main interest is an attack on a hypernet gate (a
way of getting home quickly, in theory, but also a vast amount of
bound energy that can be released explosively if things go wrong).
There's clearly a suggestion that something is odd about the rapid
development and adoption of hypernet technology, but only a little
further exploration of that theme; clearly I'm going to have to finish
the series to find out what's going on, though my guesses are being
channelled in a very specific direction.
It all starts to feel a bit facile. The basic conflict, of one smart
guy with limited resources (and the ability to train his underlings to
be smart) versus a lot of stupid guys with far more resources, is the
stuff of which heroic tales are made, but it does rather plod along at
times. It's only at the end of this book that anyone becomes more than
cardboard: our hero and viewpoint character, John Geary, tastes and
avoids the temptation to exploit his heroic status and indulge himself
in revenge. (There's also some soap-operatic character stuff, but
really that mostly feels as though it's put in to indulge the sort of
reader who feels that a real manly man can't be expected to be
celibate. Still, at least someone can disagree with our hero without
being painted by the author as necessarily Wrong and Stupid.)
I'm not at all convinced that the worldbuilding leads to the sort of
battles we see here, but hey ho. The important thing here, and I'll
admit the thing that brought me back and will take me on to the third
book, is the business of command, how to manage subordinates who don't
like each other and may not like you either. This time there's an
actual mutiny by ship commanders, though we don't hear as much about
the setup to that as I'd like; we get rather more of the aftermath.
Followed by Courageous.
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