Review: Soldiers! A Chronicle from the 31st century (Part One)
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 04 16, 2013
Standard spoiler warnings apply.The book opens with a forward by the author which indicates this was originally published by Baen more than 10 years ago. There is no mention on how the Kindle edition was prepared, but there are a number of typographical errors in the book which makes me think it was done via OCR (scanned) which probably introduced those errors. I doubt these errors would have passed muster during the original Baen publication.The book is long. A vigorous (merciless) copyediting could have cut out portions of the text without loss of story. The story opens with the invasion by an alien species and the human response. There is a lot of training of newly enlisted soldiers and some build up of the political situation. There seems to be a lot of character development, but the characters still come out a bit wooden. Not so much action-oriented.Humanity has spent several hundreds of years in peace pursuits. The military is minimal, and things like military fiction or war-gaming are frowned up. There is much "peace and harmony". Even when activated, the military is polite. But to so quickly realign into a war footing a bit stretching for me.Over the course of the story, one point that remains with me is the unfortunate name of the alien species, which I won't even try to reproduce here. The word itself is unpronounceable, so I quickly settled on calling them the "Wizhinny". It seems as if the author is trying to produce something sufficiently alien, but ends up just trying too hard. The author has done the trick of converting alien measurements to human equivalents (months, weeks, seconds; all of which are astronomical notions valid only when using Earth as a reference), but I kinda wish the species name was given the same treatment. After all, they are aliens, and their method of speech is alien. Just call them the Centaurs.There are some points of confusion in the story, as sometimes the narrative is not very concise and context shifts aren't readily apparent. For example, the parallel use of "hyperspace" and warpspace", which are both used in the story but for quite different things. I came out with with the impression that the author couldn't decide which to use, and decided to use both.One interesting and unique feature is the use of telepathic savants to achieve instantaneous communication. Something which is so alien to the aliens (pun intended) they are unaware that it even exists, and the humans are able to use this to their own advantage.I marked this as a 3-star review, which means "it's OK". I'll probably pick up the second volume of the story, as other reviews indicate things pick up a bit more.