Review: Lots of potential - but has lots of issues
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 09 16, 2011
A few comments.The book is quite long. The length is partially because of point 2. It seems logically to be a 3 or 4 book series all in one volume.The editing is poor. Beyond poor. All but non-existent. Misspellings, typos, grammar errors. Continuity errors. A lot of the text seems to have no real relation to the story itself. Just added to make the book longer I guess. I would say about 1/3 of the verbiage could and should be removed. That by itself would improve the work dramatically.The author seems to not understand the difference between velocity and acceleration. He has humans accelerating at 17 g, a rate that would kill any human. There are other similar errors relating to distance, time, velocity, and acceleration that make the work hard to follow at times.The author seems to have no clue about the real military, especially how junior officers interact with enlisted men and senior officers. Junior officers just plain do not get audiences with admirals, nor do they get to joke with them. Or have special sessions with them. It just does not work that way. Junior officers do not get assigned important projects in the manner this work portrays. They just would not have the skills to complete them.There are plenty of notions I could pick on, but the recurring donut issue is just weird. Any ship that can cook regular meals can make donuts. Why the work portrays two junior officers getting them from an admiral is beyond me. It is just one of the many annoying plot devices that made little sense to me.One of the things that needs to be edited out in its entirety is the bizarre description of the interactions with members of the opposite sex (eventually their wives) the main characters go through. Reading it is just painful.There are good things about the book, and others have mentioned most of them. Some good plot devices here and there, and the story is good enough to read if you can mentally jump over the awful stuff.There are pages and pages of clever dialog that no one would ever say. That stuff just needs to go.I could go one for a lot longer, but maybe you get the drift.