I just finished reading the Lost Fleet series, by Jack Campbell, as well as his sequel series The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier. Eleven books in total, six in the main series and five in the sequel series. I’m not going to write about them individually, because I burned through them all very quickly while I was on vacation, and honestly they all blurred together for me.
The Lost Fleet is yet another military naval science fiction series written by an ex-military author. This time, it’s about a man named John Geary, who fought a courageous last stand against a surprise attack by a neighboring multi-star-system space nation, which ended with him sprinting into a damaged escape pod while his ship blew up around him. He was awakened from survival stasis a hundred years later, and discovered to his horror that 1) the war sparked by that initial surprise attack was still ongoing, and 2) his government had turned his last stand defense of a routine convoy into a legend meant to inspire the rest of their peacetime military into a massive war, a legend that kept growing and inspiring new generations over the course of what turned out to be a grueling stalemate. Massive fleets clashed, and were rebuilt with the resources of entire planets, only to be destroyed again. Due to a wild coincidence of circumstances, Geary has to take command of a fleet filled with officers who worship the ground he walks on, and get them back home through enemy space.
The sequel series deals with what happens afterwards, when societies that have known nothing but war for a hundred years find themselves at peace. It also gets into the aliens whose presence was hinted at in the Lost Fleet books, expanding more on their motivations and place in the universe.
This premise–an ordinary soldier waking up from cryosleep to discover he’s a revered military legend–is deeply silly. And if the series treated it as a joke, even in a winking internal monologue or aside glance, I probably wouldn’t have read past the first book. Fortunately, Campbell instead takes this concept as straight-faced seriously as possible, and the end result really is a genuinely fun pulp sci-fi story.
I’m glad I’m finished reading it at this point, though. Campbell is great at writing tense military engagements, and is one of the only writers I’ve seen who takes lightspeed communications and vision delay into account while writing space battles, but he’s not so good at writing stuff like politics and interpersonal issues. There were a lot of vague indications of behind-the-scenes maneuvering going on that were never really brought to the forefront and didn’t seem to affect the plot very much, and I would have liked to have seen some indication of how the politics of the series actually worked, alongside with the cool space battles.
That said, the space battles were very cool. Campbell has a knack for telling you exactly what every unit in the fight can do in a way that lets you clearly picture what’s going on. The concept of an ancient revived war hero having to explain basic tactics to sailors in a war that has been running for a hundred years is, again, deeply silly, but it does mean that we get some excellent explanations for ourselves, the readers. This is pulp military sci-fi that doesn’t really try to be anything else, and honestly that’s kind of refreshing. I think I want something different for my next course after having burned through eleven books of this over the course of my holiday vacation, but I definitely am happy that I read this series.
Maybe I’ll come back to this universe and read Campbell’s Lost Stars or Genesis Fleet series, which are both set in the same galaxy as the Lost Fleet books. If I do, I’ll be doing it later, because right now I think I need a genre shift.