Do It Yourself

One of the effects of electronic books is cost-reduction in getting a book published -- it just doesn't cost as much to get a data file in front of viewers as it does to fund the ink and paper and labor of a physical book. This means many books that might not otherwise get the chance with an audience can do so, which has been a decided blessing for folks who like to write genre and niche fiction and a definite if somewhat less decided blessing for those of us who read those genres and niches. One of my favorite niches is military-themed space opera, and a recent perusal of the Kindle catalog produced a wealth of new titles. Here are three of varying quality.

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Like a lot of well-read military sci-fi buffs, H. Paul Honsinger has a fondness for the Aubrey-Maturin novels of Patrick O'Brian and a yen to translate them into the same kind of tale, only among the stars and spacelanes instead of the Seven Seas. His "Man of War" series is up to three volumes and features Union Space Navy Lieutenant Commander Max Robicheaux and Dr. Ibrahaim Sahin and the crew of the USS Cumberland as they battle against the Krags. The ratlike aliens want to enslave or exterminate humanity because it will not acknowledge the Krag's own divinely ordained pre-eminence among all species.

In the first book, To Honor You Call Us, Max meets Ibrahim and receives command of the Cumberland, a ship with an undistinguished history at best. He has to try to turn around his troubled command and crew while hunting for a secret Krag supply base -- a mission that only gets harder when his discovery of the supply corridor lets him stumble on a planned Krag attack that would seriously weaken or even cripple the human war effort.

Honsinger has some skill and style, which he polishes with each new volume. He doesn't waste a lot of time giving technical details of how the ships traverse interstellar space beyond what's needed to demonstrate Robicheaux's firm leadership and add the proper miiltary protocol color to his scenes. He can be quite funny, highlighting the "otherness" of the allied amphibian Pfelung race to good comic effect as well as the eternal bureaucracy of the military mind that travels into space along with humanity.

He does stray into the realm of Expository Didactia often enough to slow his narrative, and in many cases where he should show something he wants the reader to know he shortcuts and tells us instead. But the high-tension space battles and fairly deft employment of wryness, courageous heroes and intriguing characterization earned him a shot at Amazon's 47North label, which will continue to print new adventures of Max and Ibrahim and the crew of the Cumberland.

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Unlike Max Robicheaux, Captain Jackson Wolfe of the Blue Jacket is near the end of a long and hard career in Warship. A native of Earth in a loose confederation of star nations that sees Terrans as low-browed yokels, he has been barely tolerated for the duration of his service, which is now nearing its end. So, in fact, is the Blue Jacket and the Ninth or "Black" Fleet that contains it. Humanity's expansion through space has yet to find anything hostile, so anachronisms like warships and their hard-drinking captains can be retired to save money better spent elsewhere.

Except that after a routine courier mission, the Blue Jacket enters what should be a populated star system and finds no trace of the people who live there. A second system is equally devoid of human life, but it is hosting a gigantic alien spacecraft just finishing up its destructive business and that will be enough for Wolfe. His aging, underpowered and underweaponed destroyer is all that stands between several heavily populated star systems and certain destruction.

Dalzelle had another space opera series under his belt before starting "The Black Fleet Trilogy," so both his narrative and plotting flow more smoothly than a lot of other do-it-yourself ebooks. He puts together plausible intra-crew conflicts and good space battles. Wolfe's resentment and hiding out in a bottle are laid on thick enough to be unpleasant in the earlier stages of the book but take a back seat when battle is joined. Warship carries a pretty heavy tone that would get tiresome over three books; here's hoping the next pair can lighten up a bit.

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Nick Webb also sets his "Legacy Fleet" trilogy in a universe where many years of peace make humanity unready when a sneak attack happens. The ISS Constitution is one of the oldest ships still serving, a drain on resources and manpower that needs to be mothballed in order to create a more modern fleet. Her captain, Timothy Granger, is almost as much of a relic and his blunt, suffer-no-fools-no-matter-their-rank has won him few friends in the service.

But when the alien Swarm reappears 75 years after their complete defeat, armed with new technology and the means to defeat the newer ships of the human fleet, the Constitution may be the only ship capable of still fighting them off long enough to save Earth itself. And Granger may be the only captain who can pull it off.

If you're a sci-fi fan and this scenario sounds a little familiar, that's because it's behind both versions of Battlestar Galactica and the number of point-to-point similarities between the television series and the first book in Webb's trilogy is more than statistically significant. Webb's style and narrative don't offer much of a hook on their own, and he doesn't spin the story out enough in this first volume for it to be very sticky in its own right, until the very end. Enough questions show up in the very last pages to offer some possibility Webb plans to take his story in a different direction.

And as long as the series stays on the Kindle Unlimited program that lets me read it for free while I have my Amazon Prime subscription, that's just enough to make me take a look at future volumes. After all, I'm going to be on the treadmill anyway and they'd have to be pretty bad to be worse than the real estate fixer-upper shows that folks who work out when I do seem to prefer.