2017 space-navy SF, sixth of its series. The Federation is doing a
good job on the battlefield, but it's simply a smaller economy than
the Commonwealth, and those numbers are starting to tell. So Admiral
Kyle Roberts comes up with a plan to end the war now, win or lose…
Many military fiction authors treat the politics that lead to war
as a boring but necessary preamble; Stewart actually takes an
interest. Roberts, at a staff organisation that's been looking into
the progress of the war and ways to stave off inevitable defeat, has
come up with multiple plans, but it's up to the politicians to decide
which of them to adopt. (And one of those politicians has it in for
him, personally… but is not in other respects a bad person! Actual
characterisation, folks!)
Soon enough we're on to the action, though: there's a complicated
program of simultaneous strikes against strategic targets (and a
plausible-ish justification of why the Commonwealth hasn't hardened
them so far as to make their destruction impossible). But while one of
those strikes is obviously going to be the great big glory moment of
the entire war, that's not where Roberts is sent – instead, his job
is to keep the enemy commander thinking that the Alliance is still
trying to take back the worlds at the front, attack logistics bases,
and so on, as it has been so far.
At the same time, the enemy commander is shown as an interesting blend
of good soldier and fanatic, serving political masters of whom some
are fanatical and others just want their planets safe. This isn't a
masterpiece of fiddly politics or personalities, but it's several
steps above the usual "civilians bad, unless they do everything the
military says, in which case they're acceptable" that's the best many
other mil-fic series can manage.
There are certainly great big battles and desperate last stands and
crowning moments of heroism. Spaceships get blowed up real good. But,
and this is the reason I stick with this series, it's not just "a war
machine is blowing up a war machine" or even "human-shaped dolls are
shouting passionately as the bridge consoles explode"; when a ship is
in a fight, the reader has some idea of why it's there, what its
commander is trying to achieve, what the odds are like, and that's
much more what I care about than "a flight of 3,000 missiles" (though
those are here too).
Half of what would follow would be decided by computers, but the
whole point of having a human with a high-interface bandwidth in a
starfighter was to add the randomness of the other half.
Er, no, randomness is quite easy for computers. I suspect you meant
"unpredictability" or "intuition" or something of that sort.
This is the end of the story of the big war, but Stewart has written
further in this universe.
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