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| Dauntless (The Lost Fleet, Book 1) | 
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (based on 12 reviews)
Sales Rank: 1589
Category: Book
Author: Jack Campbell
Publisher: Ace Books
Studio: Ace Books
Manufacturer: Ace Books
Label: Ace Books
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 6.7 x 4.2 x 0.9
ISBN: 0441014186
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9780441014187
ASIN: 0441014186
Publication Date: June 27, 2006
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews: Read 7 more reviews...
 Fantastic for a good simple read December 11, 2007
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 November 17, 2007
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.
 Empty. October 23, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book is really really bad. The story is unbelievably predictable. Even the space battles are unimaginative. Dialog is simple, boring, unreal and in some points ridiculous. Characters have no depth. I felt while reading the book that it was writen by a 14 year old with no deep life experiences.
A thumping good read September 30, 2007
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
This book is a superb piece of space opera and it bowls along at a cracking pace. It contains big ships, great fleets, furious weaponery and a hero out of his time. If you want some large fleet actions without 'scientific' hogwash lamely trying to explain things then pick up this book and take a day or two of work.
True, there is no character development of any note, but who the devil selects a book entitled 'The Lost Fleet: Dauntless' expecting deep characters, emotional torment and high-brow plot development. This isn't a 'classic' novel and it doesn't pretend to be. Even looking at the cover art work will tell you this.
Some of the plot lines and characters do seem a tad odd and the character's actions can be seem overally simple to us readers but these elements do tend to be explained in the book and to put it simply, the characters are there to add to the drama and action, not the other way around. Perhaps, I suspect, the fleet itself is the main character. Nothing is really said in detail about the waring factions, suffice to say one side is pretty nasty and the other is not so nasty and this may disappoint those who would like a complete freudian analysis of both sides, just so they can comfort themselves that they are cheering for the good guys. Needless to say, most of the characters in the book are just trying to survive and when someone is firing at you, that's not the time to walk over to them for a nice chat about intersteller geo-politics and the moralistic nature of mankind.
If you like your science fiction realistic then you'd better off looking at erm..a biography of NASA or something along those dry mundane lines. However, if you want to be catapulted into an interstellar war, swept along through fleet engagements then pick up this book and spend a few quid. You'll enjoy it and that is the only standard by which sci-fi novels can be set.
In short I found this book a superb read and it kept me hooked right to the very end.
Yes, a 1 star review September 9, 2007
8 out of 10 found this review helpful
Firstly this book lacks anything that can be described as 'character development'. The main actor John 'Black Jack' Geary, the lost war hero, is one of the shallowest characters I have ever been exposed to. He is a most obvious manifestation of the author's ego, and the character's protestations to hate the demi-god status he enjoys are at best a fig leaf the author supplies to justify his self-serving creation.
The female characters are offensively two-dimensional, cast as either 'ice maidens' who melt before Black Jack's glory or naive youngsters who worship the ground he walks on. Whilst the male characters fall into two groups also, the idiots who oppose him, or the intelligent, vaguely developed characters that defer to his greatness.
The plot has one intriguing aspect (that I shall not mention to avoid spoiling the trilogy's few minor graces) but in all other ways is a particularly bland war story, page-turner is not how I would describe this book, 'can I be bothered to turn the page' is closer to it.
The battle scenes so praised are so obsessed with the concept of 'temporal distortion' that they become a lesson in the physics of theoretical space battles and descriptions of ship formations. Battle scenes in which the Alliance (goodies) loses barely a ship whilst the Syndics (baddies, as if it even needs stating) are annihilated to the last man. The Syndics are painted purely as 'bad guys' no attempt is made to discuss their motives or paint them as even vaguely human it is a morally 'black and white' universe worthy of George W. Bush.
If this is "As good as military science fiction gets" as the inappropriately ebullient praise on the cover states, then God help military science fiction. I have bought and will read the second instalment because its there, but the third? I wouldn't waste the 3.41.
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