The Lost Fleet

I picked up a new series of books the other day, The Lost Fleet by John Campbell. I have the first three volumes, which I grabbed off Amazon.com since they were cheaper as a set. I was worried at first that I'd bought three books in a set that I might not like, but so far the investment has been sound.

The Lost Fleet is military Sci-Fi, a sub-genre I haven't read much of, with the exception of Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers. There's very little comparison between the two, however. Starship Troopers is as much a political treatise as it is a novel. Thematically, The Lost Fleet is very different.

The back story is this. In some indeterminate point in the future, Commander John Geary is in charge of a small squadron of ships which is ambushed by the Syndicated Worlds. They are greatly outnumbered, and Geary's ship is damaged enough that it can't escape. So he stays behind and orders the rest of his ships to retreat while he holds the Syndics off in a last stand. Just before his ship is destroyed, he gets in his escape pod and puts himself in suspended animation. Unfortunately, his escape pod's distress beacon is damaged, and he floats in space for a century.

He's awoken by a fleet passing through the system and brought on board the flagship. He discovers to his horror that the war that started with the ambush on his ship is still ongoing, and that he was presumed dead and elevated to mythic status. He was given a posthumous promotion, and to every citizen of the Alliance, Captain "Black Jack" Geary is an infallible hero.

**Warning: Minor Spoilers Ahead**

The main theme of the novels, especially in the first book, is the deconstruction of our views of heroes from our past. Nearly everyone Geary meets practically worships the ground he walks on, and are convinced he can do no wrong. The Alliance is a society of ancestor worshipers, compounding Geary's problems. Because he knows he's not infallible, the adoration he receives from others terrifies and sickens him, and he lives in fear of what will happen when the people around him discover he's just as human as the rest of them.

There's also a healthy dose of culture clash, as in the hundred years of war, much has changed, especially in the military. Ships on both sides fight more like savages than an organized unit. The fleet is extremely reluctant to move away from it's bloodthirsty attacks which kill as many of themselves as they do the enemy, and it's an uphill battle to get the fleet to learn to fight again as a cohesive force, even after such tactics prove to be devestatingly effective against an enemy unable to cope with it.

One thing that I found odd: there's no prologue, or flashback, or anything of the like, describing Geary being anbushed and stuck in stasis for a century. It's brought up here and there throughout the books, but that's it. At first, I had worried that I'd accidentally started reading the second or so book in the series, but Dauntless is indeed the first book in the series. I guess the author decided to throw the reader right into the action, rather than go into something anyone would know after reading the first chapter or glancing at the back of the book.

I'm on the third book right now, and they're rather good. The science is pretty hard, with the exception of things like FTL travel and shields, which people have grown to expect in all but the very hardest of Sci-Fi. Much is made in books about the speed of light, and how conducting operations in space can be difficult when it takes minutes or even hours for someone to see what someone else in another part of a star system is doing. To get an idea of what that entails, think about when you watch a reporter on the news interview someone in another part of the world. The reporter asks a question, and there's a noticeable delay of a second or two before the other person responds. That's because even at the speed of light, it takes a second or two to for the signal to get shot into space, bounce off a satellite, and reach the person on the other side. Then, it has to do that all over again to send the reply back to the reporter. By the same token, the sun is about eight light-minutes from Earth. That means, when you look at the sun, you're actually seeing where it was eight minutes ago. Now multiply that by distance by several factors, and you can see how it gets difficult to predict the actions of a ship sitting on the other side of the system from you.

There's six books in the series so far, and after I'm done with the one I'm on, I plan on getting the rest. It's got a good blend of intrigue, action, human interaction, and food-for-thought. The space battles are spiffy, and Campbell manages to make each encounter and situation unique. The series doesn't take itself too seriously, but neither does it make a farce out of itself. The characters, especially John Geary, are complex and very human. He manages to execute what Jayne Cobb called "thrilling heroics" without turning the heroes into a bunch of swashbuckling Mary Sues. They're real, they're flawed, they're sympathetic. You groan when they make a mistake, and you cheer when they're victorious. It's a good read, and it's got me thinking I should look more into the sub-genre of Military Sci-Fi.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights