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mburnamfink 's review for:
A Sword Into Darkness
by Thomas A. Mays
Not nearly as good as Footfall or Turtledove's Worldwar, more serious than Live Free or Die, and more credibly thought out than The Darwin Elevator, A Sword Into Darkness is a fun bit of action with some serious flaws as a novel.
Mays really really wanted to tell a story where a Guided Missile Destroyer saves Earth from an alien invasion, and that's what you get here. The action sequences are top notch, with the authenticity and rapid-fire jargon that comes with 18+ years of experience as an surface warfare officer in the US Navy. He makes guided missile combat exciting, and manages a few neat developments on standard scifi space warfare with 'tactical lag' and 'oblique intercept trajectories.' As an applied physicist, Mays also manages to make the technobabble decent-assuming you buy his superalloys and magic photon drive, the engineering seems to hold up. After those high points, the quality descends sharply. The Deltans wind up having surprisingly good reasons to attack Earth in the manner that they do, but act in ways that let the protagonists be awesome, rather than according to an internal logic. I disagree with some of his political choices: there's no way NASA and the astrophysics community would sit on a visible drive flare, even if it was ridiculous, and as lousy as the military industrial complex is, I doubt they'd mess up a clear and present danger like an alien battlecruiser coming in system just because of interservice rivalry. Most fatally, anything in the book not directly related to the battles is not good at all: characterization, description, sentences. I don't have any quotes to hand, but the writing was ham-handed, even by the standards of mil-SF.* I almost shut the book on the first page, and while it did improve, I have a pretty high tolerance for schlock. Definitely at the lower end of its genre.
*Mays, if you ever read this review, I am genuinely sorry. Criticism is easy, writing is hard, and you've done more publishing a novel than I ever have. That said, you gotta work on the literary qualities--do some non-genre workshops, try some short character sketches, maybe try a collaboration. Ideas this good deserve better sentences.
Mays really really wanted to tell a story where a Guided Missile Destroyer saves Earth from an alien invasion, and that's what you get here. The action sequences are top notch, with the authenticity and rapid-fire jargon that comes with 18+ years of experience as an surface warfare officer in the US Navy. He makes guided missile combat exciting, and manages a few neat developments on standard scifi space warfare with 'tactical lag' and 'oblique intercept trajectories.' As an applied physicist, Mays also manages to make the technobabble decent-assuming you buy his superalloys and magic photon drive, the engineering seems to hold up. After those high points, the quality descends sharply. The Deltans wind up having surprisingly good reasons to attack Earth in the manner that they do, but act in ways that let the protagonists be awesome, rather than according to an internal logic. I disagree with some of his political choices: there's no way NASA and the astrophysics community would sit on a visible drive flare, even if it was ridiculous, and as lousy as the military industrial complex is, I doubt they'd mess up a clear and present danger like an alien battlecruiser coming in system just because of interservice rivalry. Most fatally, anything in the book not directly related to the battles is not good at all: characterization, description, sentences. I don't have any quotes to hand, but the writing was ham-handed, even by the standards of mil-SF.* I almost shut the book on the first page, and while it did improve, I have a pretty high tolerance for schlock. Definitely at the lower end of its genre.
*Mays, if you ever read this review, I am genuinely sorry. Criticism is easy, writing is hard, and you've done more publishing a novel than I ever have. That said, you gotta work on the literary qualities--do some non-genre workshops, try some short character sketches, maybe try a collaboration. Ideas this good deserve better sentences.