RogerBW's Blog

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.