Review: Great Plot, Weak Science
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 07 22, 2013
I enjoyed reading "this corner of the universe" The plot moved right along and the character development was good. I had major problems with the science. There was a distinct lack of understanding of distances in space and the physics of space. As another reviewer pointed out explosions don't propagate through a vacuum. Debris might or shrapnel but shock waves do not. The other issues I had were related to how distances were used. A light second is  299,792,458 meters per second or 186,000 miles/sec. There are scenes where the main ship stands off multiple light seconds to let a ships boat board a vessel. That's the equivalent of from the moon to the earth. There were issues like this throughout the book. I give an Grade of A for the plot and story but a failing grade on basic high school science.I was also rather disappointed in a few details in the battle scenes. Having the ship take evasive maneuvers through out the battle will make it almost impossible for a foe to land a direct hit such as seemed to happen a lot. With your rail guns and the larger projectile weapons that are unguided once fired. At the ranges you used in the book it would take many seconds for even your fastest projectiles to reach the enemy or visa versa. Plenty of time for the ship to move out of the direct path doing basic evasive maneuvers.If giving a monetary value of satisfaction I would say that the 2.99 for the book left me unsatisfied. I have bought a lot of 2.99 books lately that were very well done. This book seemed more like a .99 cent book dip the toe in the water to get some feed back or even a free give away for a few weeks to get some feed back from reviewers if I didn't have any on hand to give me feed back before publishing. I will say though I am not the cats meow with grammar that I didn't notice any glaring grammar errors that broke me out of the flow of reading.To the author. I admire your writing and think that you could be a very good author but you need to go back and learn the basics of distances and physics in space. It isn't hard to do. There are even some dedicated books for authors that will give you a short cut to learning it. Look for books one world building for science fiction authors. You actually did quite well on the concept of light speed limitations in observing where your foe is. That what you are seeing now is what happened there so many seconds in the past.update:I purchased and read the second book in this series and the author did a much better job. It was obvious he really stepped up to the plate. I gave that book a 5 star review. I really enjoyed the story and the best I could tell there wasn't a single gotcha that stood out to me in the whole book. Large bow to the author on an outstanding job.