Review: The good, the bad and the ugly
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 10 5, 2011
Another 99 cent self published work.  If I had to pay more, I probably would have given it a 2.This one starts out pretty good.Not horrible in the typo, spelling, and grammatical error sides of things.If you like space opera type SF you might well like this work.In fact, the first 1/2 of it is pretty good. It tells the story of a young space marine officer who (somewhat predictably for amateur military fiction) gets himself in trouble, but gets noticed by the "right" senior officer and has his career saved by transferring to the intelligence branch where he is promptly sent out as a bodyguard for a senator's daughter.Of course the premise that any of this is even remotely plausible is going to be a bit of a problem for some, but if you can get past that, the rest of it is a pretty good read.Unfortunately, the young officer gets turned into some kind of military genius and super hero. The comic book style depiction of the battles he goes through gets progressive more and more fantastic. Toward the end, it is not even remotely believable.The big surprise was no surprise at all to me. It was immediately obvious just what had happened when some information was revealed that I think the author was trying to sneak past the reader, but it was pretty obvious to me. If he was trying to be subtle about it, he failed miserably.As is very common with amateurs writing military fiction, there are some basic misconceptions about how the military actually operates that are written into the story that take away from it for me. If you prefer comic book style stories, it probably won't bother you all that much.One bizarre scene has two naval captains deciding that a very junior marine captain would be a good person to turn over command to. Just a strange notion.Then there is the even stranger idea that a thrown together force of a few janitors, cops, and space marines can somehow save the earth. Not sure what happened to the rest of the military forces on Earth. I guess they went and took a nap as soon as the invasion started.The bed hopping seems like a juvenile fantasy to me, and would best be left out entirely IMO.The author has considerable talent and it shows in the first half of the book. It is almost like he lost interest along the way and just pounded the rest of the book out after doing a pretty good 1/2 of a book. The last half of the book has one implausible event after another. It is too bad. It could have been a lot better.