Review: Good Story Ruined by Bad Physics and Poor Formating.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 12 3, 2013
I'm a little harsh on this book because of the price tag, $5.99, for that kind of money I expect better, even from an independent author.The Premise was solid, earth discovers they are not alone and are brought into a war, they really aren't prepared for. The political angles were interesting, though inappropriate for the setting, I mean the end of our race is at stake but people are still to stupid to rally and are led by mass media? Look at history, when faced with an outside force countries rally together, it's always happened and if it's a genocidal situation, racially, I'm sure the human race would rally instead of worrying about the latest version of the Kardashians, the motivations were accurate for our current crop of politicians. The author also did a great job of limiting the dues ex machina, something most authors, sadly, rely on to complete a novel.There were many petty issues, I mean come on the leader of the Terran government accusing people of not liking him because he was black? It's nearly 300 years in the future, we've got one world government, colonies, and advanced tech and were still playing the race card? Silly, just silly and one of many that I could write a wall of text about. My real issues with the book came with the total lack of research on physics and the utter disregard for consistency.At the beginning the humans "seem" to control a grand empire, everything is the largest in the galaxy, the author talks about things billions of light years away, the Milky Way is only 120,000 light years across, we have ftl communication, how? There is thought that the aliens came from another galaxy, etc., etc.,  Later we learn that in fact the human "empire" is only 4 planets, almost everything of political importance happens in Sol orbit and the people of the home planet have little vested interest in the concerns of the genocide happening on the colony worlds. As we learn that humans are actually quite new to expansion, were constantly being told that humans have something bigger and badder than the rest of the Galaxy, how? We don't have a clue. An analogy would be the 5'7" small town athlete who thinks he's the best basketball player in the state, he truly has no clue. I understand where the author was going, and I think my analogy probably sums it up, it was just very poorly done with too grand a scope. It needed to be tightened way up! You could start by replacing "Galaxy" with "known Terran Space." An example would be, "The communication relay was the largest known in Terran space" not "The largest known in the Galaxy." After all we learn that the enemy have been in the stars hundreds, if not thousands of years longer, conquered, hundreds, then thousands, then "unknown" numbers of civilizations, of course we've never run into them, so the assumption is the Galaxy must be huge, big enough we've never been discovered by this behemoth.The bad physics. I know it's sci-fi and certain liberties are taken, but again for $5.99 I would expect a little research, here's some clues. 1: There is no gravity, thus mass is determined by thrust. 2: When that thrust is applied it will travel at that speed, in a straight line, unless something is applied, forever. 3: There is no artificial gravity control in the space fighters, as evidenced by the scenes in the book, thus they would never be able to make the minute changes needed for dogfighting, they could not stop themselves from hitting anything in their way and with speed relative to their enemies would never have a chance to "get a lock" on the enemy.Coming out of blue space hundreds of kilometers apart is not "spread out" it's freaking super danger close, especially with the physics as described above, it's the equivalent of being on a Tokyo train car at rush hour, and if you've seen the pictures of the guys who are pushing people on trains during this time you know what I'm talking about.There were issues with character development, formatting, dialogue and spelling, all those things I can tolerate, if the basic story is a good one, which this was, but again, for $5.99, I would def. have to recommend people not buy this book, if not for the price structure I would have given it at least 3 and would recommend the continued reading of the series, but if the price structure stays the same, it's a no buy on my list.