SOJALS rating:

Mediocre (2/5)

I first read this on the 7th May 2004.

Mankind is fighting desperately against a venomous and vicious alien enemy, the Jillies. Across the Paladine, a great swath of space light years wide, the battles continue.

Our forces are coordinated by FTL communications provided from Earth to the outer reaches by a chain of massive space stations. If any one of these stations is lost to the aliens, Earth's forces will suffer a heavy blow in their operations against this alien enemy.

Now the Jillies are massing to attack Breakaway Station. This station is only lightly defended and unless reinforcements can be delivered in time, the Jillies will take it.

Earth however has no regular forces close enough to protect the station. The only possible reinforcement is a hospital ship and the two battle cruisers escorting it back to Earth. The hospital ship carries the frozen remains of thousands of solders who may still be revived and repaired. The crews of the ships are war casualties themselves, still desperately injured, temporarily repaired, some rebuilt as cyborgs.

Captain Absolom Bracer is now only half-human, his head and chest mounted upon a medical pedestal, and with one prosthetic arm and one mechanical. As captain, he needs his wits about him, he must stay alert, so he doesn't take his painkillers and he hurts.

Regardless, he and his crew will defend the station. Like the Spartans at Thermopylae, they with immense courage and bravery will do what is required of them. He and his crew will be heroes, alive or dead.

Stirring space opera. It's a classic but the melodramatic writing holds it back from being a masterpiece.

This novel would have blown me away as a teenager and I wish I had first read it then - I'd have remembered it very fondly, It may still have a strong effect on today's younger readers.

I liked the idea of the FTL system: carried as faster than light modulations on a light beam. Since the medium is light, the connection between two stations is only established at light speed, but thereafter communication is at FTL speeds. If the transmission between stations is broken, years must be spent re-establishing the connection. Thus Breakaway station must be held against all alien onslaught (interestingly it has recently been shown that pulses can travel down a light beam at FTL speeds, but sadly no information can be passed).

What we get strongly is that these are trauma victims, but the fact that some of them have actually died and been revived doesn't come across convincingly, or at least there's is no particular impact from their resurrection.

What's it got? loathsome aliens with a penchant for vivisection, cyborgs, battle ships attacking from space, armadas clashing in space, human frailty and heroism and quite a bit of sex.