Micro Mention "The Pirates of Pacta Servanda"

 

After this book, “The Pirates of Pacta Servanda,” I only have two more books to read in Jack Campbell’s steampunk “The Pillars of Reality” series. In this one, the cataclysmic conflict of this series is starting to kick off with early battles of the war against the great guilds.

As the title suggests, this is one of the more nautical-themed books in this series, a move in setting that I was giddy about. Why you might ask? Because I feel that Campbell's singular skill, above all his other great writing gifts, is to describe naval vessels in motion and conflict. You can tell these parts of his stories are directly informed by his Navy experience.

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Author's Website: https://www.jack-campbell.com/index.html

Micro Mention "The Assassins of Altis"

"The Assasins of Altis" was probably my favorite one yet of Jack Campbell's "The Pillars of Reality" steampunk series. He has a way of making his characters grow on you until you feel incredibly attached to them—and then he threatens their lives. I love it.

There is something about Campbell's stories that always draw me in. Even when I notice flaws, the world he creates in his stories never cracks open and falls apart for me. I'm not entirely sure at this point if my firm suspension of disbelief is a genuine effect of his quality as a storyteller or maybe I've just been so long immersed in his imaginary realms I just can't tell the difference anymore. 

In any case, I often find myself wishing the real world worked more like a Jack Campbell story than it does. There are still great, possibly world-ending perils in Campbell's stories, but there is always a core of thoughtful earnest people willing to put everything on the line to face those challenges. They aren't zealous or god-like entities and aren't immune to consequences that might result in their tragic deaths. But still, they struggle, fight, and almost always succeed because they do what they believe is the right thing to do for the good of everyone.

I'm just saying I wish there were more people like that in the real world.

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Author's Website: https://www.jack-campbell.com/

Micro Mention "The Hidden Masters of Marandur"

I’m a big fan of Jack Campbell's "The Lost Fleet" series, so I was a bit slow to get on board with his "The Pillars of Reality" series because it's a major shift in the genre—Sci-Fi to Steampunk Fantasy. But "The Hidden Masters of Marandur" has warmed me to it.

What I think did the trick is that once you get past the character introduction phase of Campbell's stories, with a little time, these earnest, hard-working, brave people always worm their way into your heart. Well, they do for me, at least. That's a bit of a back-handed compliment/insult, though, because having reread "Dauntless," recently, the first book of my beloved "The Lost Fleet" series, I did notice the same weak up front character introductions in that story too. His characters are a slow burn, but I almost always find myself liking them by the end.

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Author's Website: https://www.jack-campbell.com/

"The Lost Fleet: Dauntless," by Jack Campbell--Fiction Review

Happy Friday, my obscure space cadets—today, I thought we might jump into the first book of one of my all-time favorite military science fiction series, “The Lost Fleet: Dauntless,” by Jack Campbell. Inspired in equal measures by the Greek epic “The March of the Ten Thousand,” by Xenophon and the Chinese military treatise “The Art of War,” by Sun Tzu—I fell in love with this series around book two. Usually, I’m slow to complete a series, but “The Lost Fleet” became a bit of an obsession of mine in my mid-twenties, and each time Campbell released a new one, I’d stop everything I was reading and devour the latest book.   

***The Non-Spoiler part of this review***

What I love about this book:

The depth of Jack Campbell’s naval experience is clear and shows in his writing even though this a science fiction about a theoretical future navy about starships. How he describes how the ships move and operate are tuned down to the finest of details. As someone who has always admired the naval branch of our military the most, it’s nice to read a military science fiction novel about a navy written by someone who was in the navy.

Campbell has interesting things to say about how we mythologize great leaders, especially military leaders of the past. He critiques our human tendency to twist the perception of a flesh and blood person when we transform him or her into a legend. 

“The Lost Fleet: Dauntless” is one of those books that hits that sweet spot in my mind where Kevin the armchair admiral lives. So it immediately drew me into this world because Campbell’s massive starship battles play out like a detailed tactical simulation. These battles aren’t just one or two ships engaging, but sometimes hundreds, but he keeps the descriptions of the action supple and fast-paced. So it never feels like a long repeated list of things—to me at least—but I’m the kind of person who can watch two chess grandmasters play a game on youtube, despite being a mediocre chess player myself. Which means, if you can’t tell already, I’m hedging here because I recognize that tactical thought and discussion isn’t for everyone. But if like me, you’ve read “The Art of War” multiple times—oh boy—is this book so much fun. If you aren’t, like me, then you should be warned the whole series is like this and follows the same plot structure of: here’s an interesting tactical puzzle. How will Black Jack solve this one? And then he does. And it’s awesome.   

What I don’t love about this book:

Not really an issue in this novel, but the overall “Lost Fleet” series, since “Lost Fleet: Dauntless” is the first novel and everything is being described for the first time, but in later books, which there are a lot of, he re-describes the operation of how starships in this universe operate. A lot of it has to do with how they orient themselves. One of those details is modifying what the terms starboard and port mean, and in this universe, starboard isn’t always right when facing the fore of the ship, it’s whatever side is facing the local star. He also goes into great detail about the practical problems of relativistic effects as it pertains to ship combat moving at a significant fraction of C—the speed of light. 

For a science-fiction nerd, like me, it all sounds interesting, and it was—the first, second, and maybe the third time I heard it all. When we get to say—the ninth novel in this series, it becomes a bit tedious, since it’s pretty much the same verbatim break down every time. Each time I read it, I think, “Jack, buddy, nobody needs this, we all get it, no one is picking up the ninth novel of this series out of the blue, and if they are, they’re weird.”

Another thing that never totally goes away is there is always an element of the fleet, no matter how successful Captain Geary proves to be, who sounds like this to me: “But we think we should do the clearly fucking stupid thing to do.” In the most nasal, whiniest voice imaginable. Sometimes it’s genuinely baffling, and I hate them because they’re distracting me from the next big awesome space battle.

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Author's Website: http://www.johnghemry.com/

***The Spoiler part of this review***

***Ye be warned to turn back now***