Micro Mention "Masters of War"

Suppose you've any interest in military history or just strategic thought in general. In that case, you can't go wrong with the great courses "Masters of War: History's Greatest Strategic Thinkers" taught by Andrew R. Wilson.

So if you're like me, you find war to be terrible but fascinating. Wars are like thunderstorms in that regard, only interesting if you've got some sort of separation from the actual event. For instance, you might watch a thunderstorm from your window and be entranced, unless, of course, it turns into a tornado and blows your house down. Then it's just terrible. Both storms and wars kill people, and choosing to not understand them isn't actually a defense.

Strategic thought, however, is a lesson the history of war can teach you, and luckily it can be divorced from national death contests to enhance other aspects of your life. I think people commonly go wrong when they read things like "The Art of War" is because they then equate everything to a "war" like business or negotiation. But the real lesson and the point is to see things as a strategic puzzle to be solved. Domination is only one sort of solution and often not even the best. War hawks fall into that fallacy because they can't ever imagine solutions other than violence.

"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***