Dauntless (The Lost Fleet, #1 - 6)
I’m only going to write one review for the entire “The Lost Fleet” series of 6 books. I’ll still keep all 6 as read mostly becuase I did read all of them.
I first read this series of books about 15 years ago when it first came out, and after finishing the Vanguard: Genesis Fleet, found myself curious about how well they’d stand up to time. I must say, aside from the first few chapters being very cringe, the rest of the book series is quite decent. Its quite a page turner, although you kind of know how the story will turn out in the end. The heroes must triumph, losses will be sustained, and the big bad will be defeated.
There’s a bit of a small twist at the end that comes halfway through the series, and the exploits of the heroes are continued in the next series.
The writing itself is quite competent, and describes a hypothetical fleet combat situation quite well, where humans cannot actually do the fighting but depends heavily on computers to do most of the aiming, and stuff. The large scale fleet combat is never explained as to why they are forced to combat in near field instead of just sending autonomous missles after the enemies, but that’s ok. In essence, you have naval combat like the olden days, where fleets will sail by each other and do broadside attacks. There’s some high level strategy that comes into play, but only by the hero side. The enemy side, like the protagonist side before the hero comes onboard, have degraded into a “full steam ahead, charge the enemy with the most idiotic tactics available” strategy.
You pretty much have to assume humans have become dumber in the future when it comes to their lives to really have a chance of finishing the whole book. There’s only one character that’s actually intelligent and that’s the hero.
There’s also no character development. The hero is a male mary sue all the way through the book. He has a supporting cast of characters who are also like him, although in different ways. All the enemies, internal to the hero’s fleet and external are all so idiotic its hard to believe that bond villians could exist out of the bond universe. =)
All in all, i did enjoy re-reading the series. Like I said page turner, but this is pretty much cheetos for your brain. Turn it off, flip the pages, and then enjoy the predictable story. Good for a few hundred pages in the evening with a small glass of wine type of thing.
3* for the whole series. I think the James Corey series is a little bit more exciting, but this isn’t half bad. I will at some point finish the sequel series to this, but not anytime soon I think.