Chatter Of The Squirrel

Book: The Lost Fleet – Jack Campbell

October 28, 2009 on 8:28 am | In Books | No Comments

The Lost Fleet is currently a series of 5 books. To describe it succinctly, it is an attempt to be Horatio Hornblower in Space!

I was introduced to this by Saleem. The premise was very interesting: two galactic federations have been at war with each other for a century, and the stale-mate has depleted both sides of all officers with any skill in fleet maneuvers and tactics. The unnatural selection has resulted in fleets led by officers distinguished by their cowardice, sycophancy, and political savvy rather than military leadership. Kinda like the premise of Idiocracy. But salvation comes not in the form of Luke Wilson, but as a ship’s captain who was lost in hibernation sleep in an escape pod at the opening salvos of the war. Thawed out after a hundred years, Captain Jack Geary is put in charge of the remnants of the Alliance fleet and tries to limp back to home space with the enemy hot on his heels.

Capt Geary is Campbell’s fantasy of how a naval commander should be, and is the only well-fleshed out character in the series. The rest of the cast are merely faceless sycophants, faceless political adversaries, faceless traitors, and faceless lovers. The appeal of the books isn’t in the characters.

The appeal is in the detailed space combat. Campbell was able to imagine battles in 3 dimensions, taking place in the vicinity of 0.1 lightspeed with all its relativistic complications. Grapeshots. Hell-lances. Core-overloads. In a way, it’s the same appeal of the Death Star space fight at the end of Episode IV.

I managed to get all 5 books in audiobook format. So ‘reading’ this series didn’t cost me a lot of time. When I attempted to listen through it on Painting Thursdays though, Wolf was giving me no end of shit for the juvenile writing. He did have a point. The space combat was fun the first few times, but after a while, the didactic quality of the writing starts to grate.

Other elements in the story was also lacking. A lover jumping into bed, and then out of bed, passed for drama. Conflict takes the form of a string of near identical political nemeses. And when a character’s prejudice moved from extreme to questioning, that’s character development.

But still, fun is fun. And it’s still better writing than Tim Kring.