What instead of war?
Fabryka Słów has just released the last volume of the sequel to The Lost Fleet, so there is an opportunity to sit down to this series and not stress about waiting for the finale. The books in the Outer Space series tell the story of what happened after the end of the war with the Alliance space fleet commanded by John Geary known as Black Jack. As you can guess, in peacetime, an army of well-trained military to whom humanity owes a lot, for the government … a huge ulcer on the most important part of the body for politicians. Instead of offering the sailors plots in some distant part of the galaxy, it was decided to deal with the problem quickly and send them somewhere far away – let them look for the Aliens.
Fortunately, the whole action seems to be a strategy, because in this universe a few volumes ago it turned out that aliens exist. They are a very mysterious and secretive race, so they got the combat code name “Enigmas”. It is thanks to them that humanity has discovered a gate that allows you to jump in hyperspace (here called hypernet ) between stars that are very distant from each other. This technology is not only a window to space, but also a powerful weapon that can destroy entire planetary systems. Therefore, it is necessary to get to know her thoroughly. The best way is to deprive the aliens of control over her.
Action Outer Space: Dreadnaught unfolds quite slowly. The first chapters are personal, because the great Geary returned to his flagship with his wife, who is unfortunately his captain. You will also read about the political scuffles in the government of the Alliance and admiralty, which try to push the fleet as far away from home as possible while retaining as much power as possible. It works both ways, of course, sailors prefer to make their own decisions, because they know their ships better, and the reader slowly sees the wider context and makes up for the information from previous volumes Lost Fleet. Armada will inspect several planets in the territory of recent enemies, the Syndics, before reaching beyond the boundaries of the human-controlled zone. Only at the end of the volume will you meet another race. This long list means that if you count on epic battles, the beginning of the series will not be very interesting for you.
Military science fiction
Jack Campbell is faithful to the genre, so you will see skirmishes and planning clashes with an unknown enemy in the first volume of the sequel to The Lost Fleet . Tom Dreadnaught offers little of these amusements, but the next – Invincible – is full of them. Due to a little experience with this type of fantasy, the book brings to my mind mainly Legend of the Galactic Heroes and a little bit Battlestar Galactica.The Geary crew has no chance of returning home soon, so all their life is in the cabins or in the corridors of old warships. In fact, everything has to be gradually repaired and replaced with new ones. Most of the sailors love and trust their admiral, but there are also groups of VIPs on the journey to the aliens, and they will start to figure out who really should rule. Here, however, the associations with Commander Adama and the company end, because Campbell does not focus on psychological or sociological threads.
If I had not started reading the second volume of Outer Space , my start rating for the series would have been lower. The slow development of the action made me a bit tired, but mostly because I’m not a fan of reading about political wars. It wasn’t until the fleet left the Alliance that I started having fun with the Dreadnaught and began to observe the effects of peace among the defeated. And the tip itself… It’s something completely different. Campbell didn’t start with the earthquake, but he remembered it.
If you haven’t read the previous six volumes of the entire series of The Lost Fleet , don’t worry – it’s easy to enter this universe from Outer Space . You may not immediately understand what the universe looks like in this era, but the author will gradually explain it to you. All volumes are written in such a way that they contain elements of revisions or summaries. Campbell has woven them into the actions or deliberations of the characters so smoothly that you don’t get the impression of any unnaturalness of these elements.
Outer Space is something for fans of science fiction, full of action, and at the same time quite reliably presenting the first contact and subsequent meetings with aliens. Do not count on the atmosphere of Star Trek here , unless Geary sometimes associates you with a nervous, but always competent Picard. While it is better to be tolerant of politics, you don’t need to know the previous parts of the Lost Fleet cycle – you can save them for later, as a historical complement to the events of the Dreadnaught .
