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Gunship
When Captain Reilly Campbell and her gunship crew left the ISUs they thought they could finally live life on their own terms. With their demons behind them and a lucrative business venture as part time mercenaries and full time interstellar transporters, things were looking up. But when a retrieval mission on a remote moon goes bad, the crew is forced into a new battle, one they never saw coming.
Pursued by high tech enemies and caught in a power struggle between two psychopaths, Reilly and her team once again find themselves on point, fighting for the galaxy they call home and the people they love. Time is short, difficult decisions will be made, and truths will come to light that will make the crew question everything they have known.....and this is only the beginning.
Pursued by high tech enemies and caught in a power struggle between two psychopaths, Reilly and her team once again find themselves on point, fighting for the galaxy they call home and the people they love. Time is short, difficult decisions will be made, and truths will come to light that will make the crew question everything they have known.....and this is only the beginning.
- GenresScience Fiction
484 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 20, 2013
5 people are currently reading
111 people want to read
About the author
J.J. Snow
2 books15 followersJ.J. Snow is an active duty military member with a passion for science fiction and a lifelong love of writing and reading. Gunship is the first step to checking off a bucket list dream of publishing a space trilogy. J.J.’s interests span from military history to physics and time travel, to high power rifle techniques and backcountry camping, much of which can commonly be found interwoven in her storyline.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
March 26, 2014
Sub-genre: Military Sci-fi
GOOD:
Solid editing/polish: ✔
Fun characters: ✔
Witty repartee: ✔
Great "how-it-works" technology descriptions: ?
Great ending: no
BAD:
Rapid head-hopping: ✔
Idiot aliens won't retreat 'til their dead piled 5+ meters high: no
Unbelievable moments: no
Gunship tells the story of Captain Campbell and her crew as they try their hands at civilian work. Early parts pay homage to Firefly, the TV series, before it settles down into a fairly fast moving plot.
Several characters man the ship and the story is told from their point of view. Therein lies part of the storytelling that bothers me: If five characters are in a scene, the point of view (POV) changes to every single one of them, showing events through their eyes and telling their thoughts. Because the head-hopping was so frequent and there was no indication that it happened, it was jarring and yanked me out of the story as I backed up trying to figure out where the transition occurred.
Nancy Kress describes the results well in her book Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint: Techniques and Exercises for Crafting Dynamic Characters and Effective Viewpoints:
Each time you switch from one fictional viewpoint to another, the reader must make a mental adjustment. If there are too many of these, the story feels increasingly fragmented and unreal.
It would have been possible to tell the story with a couple of POV characters and give insights into the thoughts and feelings of the rest of the characters through dialog or picking up on external clue's to their emotional state (see The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer's Guide to Character Expression).
POV is a creative choice the author gets to make, so it's hard to say it's wrong. In fact, this is the second book in a row that I've read that rapidly head-hopped from one person to another. The other was Doctor Who: The Coming of the Terraphiles. A more famous example where POV shift's happen within a chapter is The French Lieutenant's Woman.
Gunship is obviously part of a series; it ends quite abruptly.
The characters are wonderful and the non-POV aspects of the prose are superb. The plot tears right along and there was never any chance that I was going to abandon reading the book.
GOOD:
Solid editing/polish: ✔
Fun characters: ✔
Witty repartee: ✔
Great "how-it-works" technology descriptions: ?
Great ending: no
BAD:
Rapid head-hopping: ✔
Idiot aliens won't retreat 'til their dead piled 5+ meters high: no
Unbelievable moments: no
Gunship tells the story of Captain Campbell and her crew as they try their hands at civilian work. Early parts pay homage to Firefly, the TV series, before it settles down into a fairly fast moving plot.
Several characters man the ship and the story is told from their point of view. Therein lies part of the storytelling that bothers me: If five characters are in a scene, the point of view (POV) changes to every single one of them, showing events through their eyes and telling their thoughts. Because the head-hopping was so frequent and there was no indication that it happened, it was jarring and yanked me out of the story as I backed up trying to figure out where the transition occurred.
Nancy Kress describes the results well in her book Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint: Techniques and Exercises for Crafting Dynamic Characters and Effective Viewpoints:
Each time you switch from one fictional viewpoint to another, the reader must make a mental adjustment. If there are too many of these, the story feels increasingly fragmented and unreal.
It would have been possible to tell the story with a couple of POV characters and give insights into the thoughts and feelings of the rest of the characters through dialog or picking up on external clue's to their emotional state (see The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer's Guide to Character Expression).
POV is a creative choice the author gets to make, so it's hard to say it's wrong. In fact, this is the second book in a row that I've read that rapidly head-hopped from one person to another. The other was Doctor Who: The Coming of the Terraphiles. A more famous example where POV shift's happen within a chapter is The French Lieutenant's Woman.
Gunship is obviously part of a series; it ends quite abruptly.
The characters are wonderful and the non-POV aspects of the prose are superb. The plot tears right along and there was never any chance that I was going to abandon reading the book.
December 3, 2015
Pros: fast paced action narrative, keeps you turning the pages, good military lingo and jargon, sympathetic protagonists, mercifully free of infodumps. Unlike most books of this genre, I actually read this to the last page.
Cons: takes about a third of the book before you get a handle on the characters, and some of the characters, like Reilly for example, don't even feel like real people until the last third, not one but two cartoonish sociopathic villians, neither of whom carry the narrative weight or gravitas expected of a threat to the entire galaxy, most of the tech and worldbuilding from the Star Trek / Hollywood school of scientific realism (although tantalum laser rounds sound interesting), magic sillytech mind control implants that amazingly no one has heard of (you'd think everyone would have countermeasures long ago), and most irritating of all, the book ends on a major cliffhanger, just before a decisive battle is about to begin!
Cons: takes about a third of the book before you get a handle on the characters, and some of the characters, like Reilly for example, don't even feel like real people until the last third, not one but two cartoonish sociopathic villians, neither of whom carry the narrative weight or gravitas expected of a threat to the entire galaxy, most of the tech and worldbuilding from the Star Trek / Hollywood school of scientific realism (although tantalum laser rounds sound interesting), magic sillytech mind control implants that amazingly no one has heard of (you'd think everyone would have countermeasures long ago), and most irritating of all, the book ends on a major cliffhanger, just before a decisive battle is about to begin!
November 11, 2013
When gunship Capt. Reilly Campbell and her crew mustered out of the ISU, they figured they were done with the military and they could not take on the jobs they wanted and if there was danger or they were shot at, then that just meant they would get paid more for the job. At least that is what they thought until they took the job to retrieve an artifact that one brother was keeping from the rest of the family and ended up in the middle od a plot to take over the government. A place that could get them very dead.
This was a book that kept my interest and I wanted to keep reading just to see what was going to happen next and how it would be handled. The only bad part was how it ended as now I have to wait for the next book to see more.
This was a book that kept my interest and I wanted to keep reading just to see what was going to happen next and how it would be handled. The only bad part was how it ended as now I have to wait for the next book to see more.
May 23, 2015
This was surprisingly good. I've been reading a fairly steady stream of self published sci-fi, and my expectations for _any_ scifi (self publish or not) has been pretty low lately. This blew them away. The start was kind of slow, but it got interesting pretty rapidly. Good characters, interesting world building, but not a lot of depth in places. Some things are a little "hand wavy", and I *really hate it* when a "future handgun" is called a "blaster". Like, super duper hate it always. Make some other word up you are a writer.
But overall I enjoyed this, and I'll pick up the second one. Speaking of the second one, this was was really *long*. It felt like 1.5 books of content. Not a bad thing, though.
But overall I enjoyed this, and I'll pick up the second one. Speaking of the second one, this was was really *long*. It felt like 1.5 books of content. Not a bad thing, though.
June 7, 2014
I guess I liked this book, but...I thought it drew heavily from Firefly and some of the things that happened seemed forced. I liked the treatment of the military aspect and how the crew had to deal with their PTSD from prior engagements. I liked the characters but they seemed predictable. I wanted to like it, and for a first effort the author did very well. Maybe book 2 will make me a believer.
July 17, 2014
Addicting book, at the moment I can't do this book proper justice with what is bouncing in my head. Let's just say I am going back to highlighted areas, rereading passages, pages and chapters and taking my own personal notes (I am just weird that way, i do it with all the books I fall for, and I fell hard for this one)..
Words come to mind: Intense, Hard, Fast, Engrossing, Human, Emotional, Impactful yet allowing me to see a Vulnerability I rarely explores within genre..
Loved it..
Words come to mind: Intense, Hard, Fast, Engrossing, Human, Emotional, Impactful yet allowing me to see a Vulnerability I rarely explores within genre..
Loved it..
October 28, 2013
A cross between Firefly and Battlestar Galactica. I love the strong female protagonist and her relationship with each of her crew mates. Can't wait for book two!
November 2, 2015
It was a fun adventure. I look forward to the second one. :)
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews