Review: A Space Opera with some flaws
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 08 1, 2013
First of all, I bought this after reading the first book in the series, so the flaws aren't serious enough to keep me from reading the rest of the series. The author has developed a fascinating universe and does a pretty good job with the plot and characters. The scope of the tale is huge, so keeping the characters straight and remembering different story lines does not make this the kind of book that you can put down for a while and pick up the story easily from where you left off. I'm reading the first three back to back to back, but if the fourth installment is not released in the near future it will be kind of like trying to read the last few Wheel of Time books after Jordon passed away.The only other problem I had for my personal enjoyment was with the battle scenes. They were just a bit too repetitive and, while the science seemed very accurate, listing how many missiles did and didn't make it through the missile defenses was too detailed for me. Easy fix, of course, was speed reading through those parts of the battle. Not a serious flaw.I also appreciated the authors attempt to extrapolate future science. Of course, in reality the chances that anyone living today would be able to predict what advances we might make would be like expecting cavemen to predict computers. Still, the author did include several ideas that seem quite likely. That gave the story the feel for taking place in the far future. (I'm not sure people would have stopped genetically improving the species with a real genocidal threat looming, but most of the things included seem very likely.)All in all this series sold itself to me by its ideas. The minor flaws for me that I found weren't anywhere close to discouraging me from enjoying both books and buying the third.