Lost fleet: Dauntless

Dauntless is an excellent novel to start off a military sci-fi series and setting, but it does start on extremely rocky footing and ends extremely quickly, leaving you wanting more. Jack Campbell's real life experience with in a navy means that he has an excellent grasp of military organizations, and this is translated extraordinarily well into text so that even us laymen can see the authenticity.

While the novel sells you on the idea of a man out of time, turned into a hero posthumously, struggling to live up to those ideals, I actually found the novel to be a brilliant breakdown on what might happen to society if it actually fought a modern 'total' war for a hundred years. Jack Campbell has given a great deal of thought to the military organization and its changes, and if there are oddities, I beg that you give the author time and space to make it clear why these things happened. His real-life experiences ensure that almost any part of the Alliance Navy that seems 'wrong' has very good reasons.

That said, the novel starts off with a poorly written cold-open which may alienate a lot of readers. The villains are either under-characterized or one-dimensional feckless assholes. Additionally, the novel is very short and you'll be left wanting more. I started Fearless (the next novel) immediately and while this is a fun, enjoyable ride, I don't see it being complex/thrilling enough for it to be perfect.

Recommended with reservations.

I think I like military science fiction. But it's so hard to tell, because a lot of it isn't very good.

What I mean here is that The Lost Fleet isn't very good. It's not awful, it's all-round better than [b:Into the Black|12971820|Into the Black (Odyssey One, #1)|Evan Currie|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1334235177l/12971820.SY75.jpg|16237035] (by Evan Currie, and which I reviewed before) for example, and yet in individual ways its so much worse.

The characters are all the same. The bad apples are cardboard cut-out people with no personality apart from the will to be the villains.

It needs an editor to point out the language problems. Phrases with annoying repetition, like
"He could see that the ship had once been a good-looking ship, but..." just set my teeth on edge.

People glower and scowl a lot, which is apparently the MSF way of showing emotion.
The protagonist is constantly exhausted, which has an in-universe explanation, but is really a lazy way of replacing conflict with an inner struggle. In one paragraph, his effective second-in-command goes from "glowering" to "glowing" because he compliments her. It's like people are really primitive state machines or something.

The premise is interesting: it's an interstellar case of impostor syndrome. I mean, it's definitely explored, I'm just not sure that repeating thoughts about how he can't live up to people's expectations is a fulfilling exploration.

Then there are Big Space Battles and I have a problem with them.

I mentioned [b:Into the Black|12971820|Into the Black (Odyssey One, #1)|Evan Currie|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1334235177l/12971820.SY75.jpg|16237035] earlier because I see a lot of similarities between the books, but what Currie does well is his presentation of the mechanics of warfare over large distances. Campbell tries to make things trickier by factoring in light-speed delays where one side can't tell what the other is doing for minutes at a time, and that's... reasonable. It's actually pretty smart.
It would work if his premise - that both sides have no concept of formations or tactics whatsoever - wasn't so preposterous. It would work if his strategy wasn't "attack from the sides rather than head-on". It would work, but it doesn't, because everything feels like a muddle stretched over several pages.


There are a couple of fairly clumsy hints that we're going to be seeing Mysterious Aliens in the sequels. A bit of conclusion-jumping by an otherwise unseen team of engineers gets revisited near the end with the protagonist musing to himself over whether aliens could be real. Hmm.

I feel I should note that my mockery of this book is not because it is bad so much as because it is mockable.

Right, so Captain John Geary gets into the lifepod, after having stayed behind to cover everyone's retreat, and initiates suspended animation to pass the time until he's picked up. He gets out of the lifepod, and its a hundred years later, mid-battle in the same war, still being fought. Somehow, his defense of the retreating ships is remembered as one of the war's first acts of heroism, and he finds that he is remembered as "'Black' Jack Geary" and idolised.

After he is scooped out of his life-pod, and wandering around stunned, the fleet commander informs him that the fleet's senior staff is going to be going over to the enemy flag-ship to negotiate terms for a truce, and they're going to leave Geary in charge, as he is technically the seniormost officer. "But don't worry," he doesn't say, "They will almost certainly not kill us all and leave you in charge. Taking all our Senior officers to their flagship is a totally un-suspicious demand!"

Shockingly, they are all killed, and the enemy demands the surrender of the fleet. Geary finds himself in command of a fleet he knows nothing about, with knowledge of the tactical situation and military technology that's a mere 100 years out of date.

But even worse, he discovers that in the last hundred years, the navy has become alarmingly slack; they don't even salute anymore, have lost any knowledge of tactical manoeuvring, preferring to hurl themselves defiantly to their deaths, and are accustomed to giving their commanding officer backchat. It is difficult to tell which of these horrifies Geary more.

A great deal of the book concerns Geary dealing with his legend; he insists he is no one special, but also insists on his way or the highway. And, as Geary reintroduces radical ideas like 'not killing prisoners' and 'not walking into traps', those around him are astounded by his brilliance and moral courage. Geary must cope with the twin scourges of his undeserved reputation for awesomeness, and the pressure of being just that much more awesome than everyone.

Also: John, 'Black Jack' Geary, hero of a book written by Jack Campbell. Just sayin'.