However, Geary is located and revived from cold sleep by an Alliance fleet a century after he went missing. He was believed lost in space and long dead after a nasty battle with the Syndicate Worlds.
The hero of this saga is Captain John "Black Jack" Geary, a soldier for the Alliance. But at least this one has a chance to rescue his career from the Big Brother software that has sent so many undeserving writers packing. The Lost Fleet may take another volume or two before it matches the excellence of Campbell's work under his own name.
But the book's second half makes up for the quibbles I have over its first. It isn't until you're almost halfway into the book before the characters begin to feel like people, and even then they never really shed their archetypal qualities. The only complaint I have with Dauntless is that it takes too long getting going - not in the action department, certainly, but in adding the intellectual and moral dimension that makes Campbell's military tales stand apart from the pack. Hemry/Campbell's space operas (and I'll refer to him as Campbell from here on) have always sought to add new layers to the conventions of military SF, and this new series is no exception. After all, the notion of being consigned to oblivion by a computer seems a little too close to some of the bleaker visions of dystopian SF to me. Okay, perhaps not, but there ought to be. Surely there have been armed insurrections over less. I'm not sure if there's a word for how infuriating and depressing this is, that the fate of a writer's career is determined by software. The pen name short-circuits that because the software just sees the pen name and doesn't assign any sales history to it." Based on prior sales, the chains order fewer copies, so they sell fewer, so they order even fewer, so they sell even fewer. I've been caught (like so many others) in the decreasing orders death spiral. military SF, there's this: "The pen name was primarily driven by bookstore buying software. In addition to wanting to get away from the pigeonholing authors endure when they're known for writing one type of book, e.g. In an e-mail exchange, Hemry explained to me the reasons for using a pseudonym for his newest opus. Hemry, whose previous series for Ace was the tremendous but only fair-selling Paul Sinclair series of military legal thrillers. Book cover artwork is copyrighted by its respective artist and/or publisher.
All reviews and site design © by Thomas M.
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