Review: Straddling the Fence Between Action and Social Science Fiction
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 03 16, 2014
I have read many of Nuttall's works--he puts out a lot of novels in a short amount of time--and for this I am impressed and grateful.  I am not a fan of social science fiction--in part because few authors have the skill set necessary to opine on the subject--Heinlein set a pretty high bar.  Nuttall does, however, fill his stories with enough military science fiction to allow the reader to overlook the soap box political aspects found in his reads.Oddly, the "Afterword" found at the end (obviously) of the book contained a far better discussion of the subject than what we were given in the storyline.  I do not complain that the characters made mistakes in building their government--my issue is the book did not focus on the dire need and steps necessary to learn from those mistakes.  Really--almost committing genocide isn't enough for a huge wake up call?  An attitude of gosh--maybe we need to change a few things is not the response I would expect.  The characters did not, as Nuttall would like to tell us, "grow and develop" -- a "Wild West" approach to governance hardly makes a political statement.Perhaps this is my frustration with social science fiction--just as you don't abuse the laws of physics when writing a good science fiction piece--don't pontificate on politics unless you intend to do the subject justice.