Marines

This is hands down one of the worst (sci-fi) books i've read in a long time.

The first person narrative is one that is really hard to use well, and the author
simply does not even use the few advantages of that narrative.

There is just hand full of dialogues in this book, and most of those are
horrible. It feels quite weird when he switches from past to present in
those dialogues, just to switch right back to past again.

The book would be a decent outline/background plot for a story, if you can
overlook logical errors to the tech - however it completely lacks
character development, conflict, suspense, detail.

Just to give a few examples (SPOILERS!!!):

When the protagonist wakes up in hospital and meets the female
doctor who kinda becomes his girlfriend later, there would have been a
good story to tell.
All the Author comes up with is a few smiles, and the mention that he flirts
with her. Not much more about how what why. Later, when he meets her again,
after the hospital, out of nowhere they seem to be a couple.

Basically the same happens with one of the superiors of the protagonist,
they meet two times, the second time its mentioned that they had a bottle
of booze together and the superior being less drunk brought the protagonist
to bed.
A few pages later hes suddenly a good friend, father figure and mentor.

The author manages to establish a background for the protagonist who used
to live in the streets, run with a gang, and pretty much came to the marines
right from death row - does he ever use that background? No. It gets mentioned
that with his training as a marine he left that life behind.

I'm going to skip ranting about the "only soldiers are the good guys here,
civilians and politicians and everyone is bad"-part because that i can actually
live with in a military-sci-fi novell.

Bottom Line: if you want a background setting to create a rpg on, or some
shooter computer game, this book might be a useful source - reading it for fun
just does not work out.