Review: Good military fiction with very little scifi
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 12 16, 2013
Without spoilers: A readable piece of military fiction, but there was practically nothing preventing it to be written in a contemporary setting, and the lack of scifi became rather disturbing. This is by no means a must-read, but well written easy piece to pass the time, if you like the theme. The writer makes strong political statements, almost as much as to cause annoyance, but somehow, surprisingly, it does not get irritating. I fear  I'm being brainwashed without knowing it. :)Spoiler alert:This story is set many thousands of years from now. People travel between the stars and this story happens in a very distant, remote one. There's the good guys and the bad guys and the bad guys are very, very bad. The bad guys are very low-tech, but the star-faring people aren't that far from 2013. In fact, any special ability they have doesn't seem to play any strategic or even very little tactical difference compared to the capability of modern-day forces. I'd like to read scifi, and having the characters arrive by starship isn't enough to deal it. I'd be okay to read a fictious military contemporary military story, but I'd like it to be labeled what it is.The other thing that constantly nagged me is the soldiers' and marines' absolute and non-questionable belief to their cause, which in this case seemed to knowingly start a campaign that's going to have a three-fold casualty figure to rescue 70 people. I'm not saying military people wouldn't do such an operation (heh) but maybe the thought should have crossed the minds of people, especially since the commanding characters had serious woes about losing people in their command. Even if this is a conscious omittance from the writer, it still seems strange not to see this issue as other psychological troubles do come up constantly. Bitching about the cause and making very dark humour out of it is a marine tradition that I'm very surprised not to find in these series.