Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2969 in Books
• Published on: 2006-06
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 304 pages

Customer Reviews

You can hear the tattered sails flapping in the wind
This book bears no resemblance to the review that tempted me to buying it. About half way through the book I went back and checked if it was really marketed as an 'adult' book or a 'young-adult' book, it's so poorly written and seems aimed at a much younger audience. The characters are two dimensional and the whole story reads like a rehashed version of a Horatio Hornblower type book, the physics is a band-aid to the lack of story or ideas, thrown over the top to make it seem valid as 'sci-fi'. If the book was slightly rewritten you could easily imagine it as a lost fleet story of ancient sailing vessels, with all the accompanying saturday morning tv appeal. I'm amazed Black Jack didn't have a parrot on his shoulder.

As others have said, the characterisations really do follow some limp cliches, with the villains being stupid and the good guys all loving Black. Shallow, boring and so predictable.

I see the series has been extended, i won't be buying them.

Fantastic for a good simple read
This book is set in the future when humanity has colonised the stars and diverged into different groups depending on political outlook. The hero of the story so speak is a member of the Alliance, a group who are fighting the protagonists in the story - the Syndicates. The story focuses around the main character who has been rescued from a survival pod after one hundred years of suspended animation/hibernation after fighting the open shots in the war and becoming a part of history. It is his job to rescue the Alliance fleet after total disaster and snatch victory from the jaws of despair and defeat.

The book was a very easy read and a page turner. From the science fiction point of view it was a good blend of `science' in terms of sub-light travel and relativistic effects to the `fiction' of the story and some of the more esoteric technology. I found the book a good mix of Battlestar Galactica (the new one) and Buck Rogers rolled into a thinking mans space opera. Well worth buying and I have immediately ordered the next instalment.

Enjoyable Read
I have read better books and I have read worse books. Basically, this makes for an interesting read and whilst the character development is weak and the plot is weak, it is actually a hard book to put down. If you try to analyse the plausibility of the storyline, you can see that there is some logic and substance present.

Anyway, a good read and I will be buying the next 2 books.