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.