Review: Waste of a good idea
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 03 31, 2012
The initial plot sounded quite promising.  About the first 25% of the book deals with the two enlisted men and their relationship with the aliens on a spaceship.  Despite some tedious detail, this was quite engaging.Thereafter, the book deteriorated quite rapidly.  We are given not just stereotypes of military (more particularly Navy) officers, NCO's etc, but caricatures.  Would a Naval Captain be put in charge of the first human contingent to go to the stars with alien visitors?  Surely, the intelligence agencies would have found a way to slip someone on board as well.  Would the Captain, who is going to be flying fighter planes modified to take space engines off the spaceship, arrive and immediately announce that none of his pilots were going to learn the alien language?  Such rampant stupidity is hardly believable.  What's more, even after a couple of years in space, they have not learned anything of the alien language (sorry the enlisted men learn to order beer) and the Captain still sticks with his decision, despite being at the mercy of the enlisted hero in translating everything and hating every time he has to have the hero translate something.  One would have thought that the team to go into space would be handpicked for intelligence and flexibility, given that humanity had no idea what it would meet out there.Please do not get me started on the school boy fantasies vis a vis the female aliens and how the hero ends up with two of them.  As for the depiction of the IRS, it is laughable.About 50% of the way through the book, I felt like giving up.  I did finish it, it was not time well spent.