2017 space-navy SF, second of its series. War has broken out in
earnest, and Captain Barron and Dauntless are rushed out of the
repair yard to join the desperate defence.
Well, what a shame. The first book had a lot of space-navy cliché
in it, but it mostly maintained focus on the two ship captains, each
trying to do their duty as they saw it. This time we have sprawling
multi-viewpoint battles, and the unexpected but welcome developments
in personality from that first book are just missing here. Instead
it's space action and more space action: the delicate main weapons are
broken until it's suddenly time for them to work, and flight deck
controllers repeatedly say things will take twenty minutes only to be
told to do them in ten. (Which is a great way to train your
subordinates to pad their estimates in future.) Various equipment is
run at 110% of rated capacity, and it never burns out.
Why are these two fighter pilots rivals? Nobody seems to know, not
even them, but they can patch it up when it matters. The enemy are
still Space Commies, complete with political officers, but it turns
out they also have cloned slave-soldiers, and a huge mobile
logistics outpost. (Yeah, Allan accepts that logistics matter, so
that's good I guess.) A spymaster for Our Side fakes orders to get the
nervous admiral out of the way so that the young aggressive admiral
can take over, and gets away with it because Our Side's politicians
are so corrupt that he can blackmail them… and apparently this is
fine, or at least nobody seems terribly worried about it.
The battle scenes are lively enough, but the good guys have basically
English-type names with very occasional exceptions and are mostly
competent, while the bad guys have French-type names and are all about
the political climbing and/or assassination, and there's nothing like
moral subtlety to be found.
What impressed me in the first book was the tragedy of good against
good, and Allan does not repeat that; this is merely by-the-numbers
space navy fiction, and thus a huge let-down. I may read one more of
these in case matters improve but I was sadly unimpressed by this one.
Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.