An easy-to-read military space opera attempting to have a deep discussion
Military SF as a phenomenon tends to attract authors with military backgrounds, and I find it fascinating to compare their approaches to things like military tradition and discipline with the approaches taken by authors with other backgrounds. Without in any way trying to suggest an association (I don’t read enough military SF for that), it has nevertheless not escaped me that an author whose non-writing career was ‘lawyer and antique dealer’ was really keen to have his spaceship captains execute mutinous crew members for the sake of discipline in a crisis. Meanwhile, Jack Campbell, author of The Lost Fleet series, which begins with Dauntless, was a navy officer before becoming a writer, and his spaceship captain tends to chuck mutinous people in the brig and then have a lot of meetings. The frequency of all-fleet meetings in this book convinces me as nothing else does that Campbell knows whereof he writes.
In fact, one of the strongest elements of this book is Campbell’s reflection on military traditions. He’s very pro-them, but not in a fascist way. And he gives himself the opportunity to reflect on that through a rather ingenious plot device. John Geary, commander of an Alliance Fleet ship, acclaimed fame and honor when the neighboring Syndicated worlds (‘Syndics’) launched an attack on the Alliance, kicking off an unending war. Although Geary was lost in the battle, his selfless sacrifice ensured that his crew escaped safely and lived to tell his story. He was granted a posthumous promotion to captain, and his memory lives on for the next century in the legend of ‘Black Jack’ Geary, the one man who could get out of any fix, win any battle, lead any mission to brilliant success.
Except he wasn’t lost; he made it into a damaged escape pod at the last minute and drifted in suspended animation until, a century later, he is picked up by an Alliance ship, thawed out, and learns what has happened in the last few decades. And it’s not great. Besides the century of constant war, he learns that the military has also degraded in a variety of ways, some of which were not quite believable—more on that later. They’ve adopted a more democratic system of decision-making, in which ship commanders all vote on proposed fleet actions (this is bad); they’ve apparently lost all their tactical training (this is very bad), and they’ve even given up saluting (this is astonishingly bad).
Fortunately, Geary’s prompt posthumous promotion means that he has built up a century’s worth of seniority as captain, so when the rest of the fleet’s senior staff are executed by the Syndicates during an ostensible negotiation that was apparently in no way an obvious set-up for a betrayal, Geary ends up in charge of the fleet. The task: to escape Syndic space, carrying with them the MacGuffin—excuse me, I mean the access key to the Syndic hypernet transport system—back to Alliance space. And, through the power of remembering former, better tactics and traditions, and also knowing how to salute, he does.
I mean, I assume he will. This is a six-book series, and I’m partway through book 3 at the moment, but it’s pretty clear that he will. Which is also kind of the problem.
See, Geary’s main character arc is his struggle with being a man: John Geary, who is seen as a legend, Black Jack Geary. He is regarded by many of his deeply religious crew as a gift from the Living Stars and their Ancestors (a firm cultural tradition of ancestor worship, which was a rather nice touch) to come rescue them in their time of need. ‘I’m only human!’ he thinks, at excruciating length. And yet, every time something goes wrong, every time he needs to outthink the Syndics, outguess them, outfight them, he always wins. There is never a situation in which he makes a mistake, gives the wrong order, guesses wrong, or in any way is responsible for anything bad happening. And this badly undermines the attempted discussion of man vs. myth that Campbell is trying to have here. It’s as if, in his desire to work through the mechanics of space battles and supply runs in enemy territory, Campbell forgets that sometimes the cool plans might not work.
And that brings us to something else that doesn’t work terribly well here: the discussion of military tactics. I’m going to comment solely from the perspective of a reader, since I know nothing about actual military tactics (and, to be fair, no one knows anything about space tactics). But a huge part of the plot has to do with the idea that Black Jack’s legend has almost single-handedly been responsible for a shift in military culture away from thoughtful, clever tactics, instead encouraging ship commanders to be thoughtlessly, stupidly aggressive. Black Jack mythically was super-duper aggressive, and so in copying his example, modern spaceship captains end up seeking the credit for individual wins, rather than engaging in disciplined joint action to ensure a successful encounter overall. The result is a staggering loss of ships and a death count that produces a real dearth of seasoned, experienced commanders. So one challenge that Geary has to overcome is re-training this fleet under his command to stop using Bad New Tactics and start using Good Old Tactics again.
Now, I suppose I could accept this shift in tactical culture, even though it requires me to accept a transitional period during which the Bad New Tactics are taking over and causing enormous losses, despite which no one says, ‘Hey, maybe we shouldn’t be fighting battles this way?’ But the problem with this plot point is that it requires the Syndics also to adopt the same Bad New Tactics, otherwise there would be no way for the centuries-long stalemate to persist. It’s pretty clear from Geary’s successes that, if the Syndics had stuck with the Good Old Tactics that Geary is re-introducing, they’d have won all the encounters with the Alliance, and that means they would probably have won the war pretty quick. So why did the Syndics shift in the first place? The Alliance shifted to be like Black Jack, but the Syndics don’t care about Black Jack. He’s not their hero. So they must have just decided to start being bad at fighting, which is hard to swallow.
That being said, there are some good bits in these books too. First, Campbell is really good at gender equality. Captains and leaders are equally likely to be men as women, and there isn’t even any tedious self-congratulatory lampshade hanging on it. It’s just part of the world-building. There’s also a certain pleasing rhythm to Geary’s problem-solving, as he thinks through some objective, such as where to resupply the fleet, or deciding which route to take back to Alliance space, or confronting antsy ship commanders who object to his methods.
And finally, there’s also a careful attention to the relativistic effects of long-distance space battles. Campbell never loses track of how far people are from various events, such that whatever they see five light-hours away (or however distant) actually happened five hours (or however long) ago. This consistently structures all the space battle scenes. When the fleet magically-FTL-wormhole-materializes (or “emerges from Jump space”) into a star system, they can see the precise number of Syndic ships already there as of five hours ago, and start planning the engagement accordingly. Meanwhile, the Syndic ships and cruisers aren’t even going to know that the Alliance fleet arrived for another five hours. Every encounter is built around this sort of light-speed limited thinking, which works well.
The antsy ship commanders who don’t like Geary’s leadership offer an opportunity for some thoughtful internal tension in the book. They serve as a counterpart to the hero-worshippers that make Geary so uncomfortable, but the source of their antagonism is the same: The reason they disagree with him so vehemently is because they’ve subscribed wholeheartedly to the ostensible Black Jack philosophy of fighting, and don’t like the real John Geary telling them they’re wrong. Whether supporters or detractors, the Black Jack’s legend affects how everyone views Geary’s command.
In practice, though, the Bad Commanders form another point where I have difficulty believing, because—remember—Geary never loses battles and never does anything wrong. And it’s not as if these captains have any better ideas; they simply want to cause difficulty for him by being dumbheads. At some point, aren’t they going to have to face facts and realize that they’re wrong?
Or maybe not. Maybe the most realistic part of this book is how dumbheaded some dumbheads are, even when their lives and futures depend on it. But if that's what it takes to make a book realistic, then I'd rather skip the lived experience of ex-soldiers and let a better writer tell me a more entertaining tale than the best that reality has to offer.
Highlights:
• Gender equality• Careful attention to space battle tactics
• Kind of dull
Nerd coefficient: 6: still enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore
Reference: Campbell, Jack. Dauntless [Ace Books, 2006/Titan Books, 2011].
CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative