![]() The combat that is vividly described between the Alliance and Syndic ships relies heavily on real physics principles. How does one man stand in his own historic shadow? The internal struggle he faces between his unwanted public persona and his own sense of self weighs heavily against his sense of duty for those he commands. Everyone regards him as a fearless genius who is always many moves ahead of his enemy, but to Geary himself, he is still an ordinary, inexperienced captain. His actions, which were responses to specific situations he faced long ago, are standard procedure in the Alliance. Upon awakening, he discovers that a great legend has built up around his name. When he was frozen, he was an ordinary, inexperienced captain who was forced to make hard choices in a short time-span to try to stay alive. These questions are at the heart of what Geary faces. ![]() What would he make of our society? What would he think of the way history has portrayed him? What, in turn, would we think of the live person interacting with us? Imagine if George Washington were to suddenly be thawed out of cryogenic sleep in modern 2019. There are two elements of this novel that make it worth reading, namely, Geary’s “fish out of water” backstory and the physics-based methods of combat between space vessels. This leaves the fate of many ships in his hands as he tries to return everyone to the safety, deliver valuable data on the Syndic to the Alliance headquarters, and fight off constant enemy attacks to do so. He is thrust back into military service, only to find the fleet he now commands thrown far from home. The universe that greets him is one in which everyone he ever knew has long since died, and he is considered a legendary military genius and hero by a society who grew up reading about him in textbooks. The main character is Captain John “Black Jack” Geary, who is discovered by Alliance ships and awoken after a prolonged cryogenic sleep. They each use a form of faster-than-light travel and cryogenic freezing is a proven technology in this novel, which is the first in a series. In many ways, this is a rather typical futuristic science fiction novel, with two opposing sets of interplanetary human governments at war: the Alliance and the seemingly villainous Syndic. If you’ve ever wondered how combat between man-made spacecraft might actually function based on physics, then Jack Campbell’s The Lost Fleet: Dauntless is just what you need. Science fiction stories in literature, film, and television have depicted battles between space-faring ships for decades, even before the first human went into space.
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