Review: I liked it despite a lot of issues I had with it
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 02 4, 2013
The author has been hanging out at the Baen Bar slush pile since before I started there. He publishes his books there hoping to get a publishing contract that so far has eluded him. I read this story there some time ago when he published it there one chapter at a time. He since sent me a copy to read in exchange for a review.Some comments.The less flattering reviews have some valid criticisms and you would be well served by reading them. I did not understand the review that complained about Marines using foul language though.One 3 star review said "The plot of this book is Falkenberg's Legion landing on a planet to help Beowulf's Children start a Foundation. If you don't mind re-reading the same story done by better wordsmiths, it is not the worst book you can find." Not a bad synopsis, IMO.For a self published work, it is pretty good in the writing error department. I noticed at least one word that appeared to have been auto-corrected or spell checked to the wrong word, and some grammar errors, but not to a quantity that made the book unreadable as often happens with SP works.There is a good amount of action that makes the story fun to read.The political background is a good thing to have in this kind of book, kind of reminiscent of Clancy in some ways, without Clancy's gifts of prose though. Much of it reads like a diatribe against the political structure rather than just a recounting of what is going on which makes it a lot harder to believe for me.The author avoids the trap many amateur SF writers fall into of adding in a bunch of pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo to try and explain the science behind what is happening. Better to treat it as magic and describe the effects which the author does in a fairly consistent way.Basically the story line is Marines good - other military forces and politicians bad. Chris has written a number of stories like this where there are good guys in uniform trying their best against near impossible odds to do good. Unfortunately, it just falls flat for me. Military forces are extremely expensive and no government is going to spend money on them and let them do as they please as this book portrays. They are there solely to enforce the will of those in power and ultimately that is what they do.There are some inconsistencies that made me crazy here and there. The CO of the Avalon Civil Guard is referred to as a major, yet in another place there is a colonel in the Guard, and another place it refers to "hundreds" of  officers in the Guard. It seems unlikely that a mere major would command a unit that had "hundreds" of other officers including at least one colonel. The structure of the Civil Guard was also inconsistent. It seemed like in some places there were only a handful of short companies in the whole guard, yet other places it is described as having some good sized bases that themselves had substantial numbers of personnel.There is also the problem of unit size and command structure. Squad sized units are referred to as platoons. In one case a platoon sized unit was commanded in combat by a recent graduate of an abbreviated boot camp who was a temporary corporal.Didn't buy in to the idea that somehow the marines had what amounts to an unlimited supply of Imperial credits to pay for things. They are 6 months from the Empire. The Empire is collapsing. Who is going to accept what amounts to fiat money from some entity that is collapsing far, far away?The marines are apparently provided with various implants and have some ability to "boost" as necessary. Yet in one place they are described as being pretty much normal people who gained their physical abilities by training and exercise. There is also the issue of having females in a combat unit that are every bit as physically capable as the males in the unit. A bit of political correctness on the author's part perhaps. Better to just have everyone supplied with some kind of enhancements IMO rather than devolving into PC.I also never believed the individual marines cared all that much about collateral damage. I suspect anyone in combat only really cares about getting himself and his comrades out alive. If that takes collateral damage, so be it. That does not mean they will engage in deliberate atrocities, but just that worrying about things unrelated to the task at hand is very low on their list of things to worry about.I dithered between giving it 3 stars or 4. You might think given all the bad and mediocre stuff in the book that I would have given it 3 stars. I ended up giving it four though. I guess I wanted to believe in a fairy tale too, just like the many other reviewers who gave it 4 or 5 stars. If you want your military SF to be more realistic, you might not like this book much though.