Dan’s Reviews > Into the Black > Status Update

Beginning to be a bit of a slog: I find the ground fighting and dogfights less interesting than anything that takes place on the actual ship, but my bigger problem right now is I’m waiting for this book to do something creative. We’ve all read about one-dimensional bug aliens before, we’ve all seen America in Space, etc. I’m waiting for something novel to happen.

This author’s pretty good with military jargon, but he just had a corporal call a gunnery sergeant sarge instead of gunny.

Enough with the pontificating—I’m really into military stories, but I have little patience for characters giving speeches about what it means to be a solider. Also, I really hope there won’t be a romance angle with Stephanos and Milla, but I expect there will be.

“Computer, adjust translation matrix to include Asian inflection coding as well as the European Romance languages.”

Asian. Come on, bro; there are 2300 languages on that continent.

I’m having fun with this so far, just a good old space opera. But it’s driving me crazy that the crew is often saying Yes, sir when they should be saying Aye, sir.

A little bummed it’s the Western world vs. the Eastern world and the Western side is so much ahead that they have FTL travel. Pretty old hat, and maybe Trek spoiled me, but I much prefer a united Earth is my space operas. But the writing is fine so far and it has good reviews, so this isn’t enough to turn me off.