Book 7/50 : The Lost Fleet Fearless

Courageous is the third book in Jack Campbell’s Lost Fleet Series. It follows the first book Dauntless, and the second book Fearless. It continues the story of Captain ‘Black Jack’ Geary as he endeavours to get the alliance fleet home through enemy territory.

While the narrative continues on, it takes sometime to get going. Campbell continues with trying to flesh out the characters. While I understand why he’s doing this, part of the charm of the first book was the fact that apart from Geary the characters were paper thin. After all this is a military sci fi book you don’t need characters to be anything more than efficient/good/team-players , sloppy/insubordinate or just plain baddies. Sometimes the scenes between Geary and Victoria are rehashes of earlier scenes in this and the other books. Like he is trying to hammer home the format of their relationship so that everyone in the class fully understands. The fleshing out isn’t all negative the series does benefit from the view into fleet politics. Loyalties are shown not to be so black and white. It turns out those that support Geary aren’t all angels and those that don’t are not necessarily idiots.

The arc plot continues as Geary’s theory on a third party involvement in the hypernet is all but confirmed. Although the interesting nugget is added that maybe they aren’t alien rather they may be a third group of Humans, as there is very little evidence either way. While the impact of Geary’s previous victories on the syndicate worlds are shown. As its hinted that his good treatment of civilians is causing a softening of feeling towards the alliance and that this may lead to a revolution as syndic civilians seem to only be kept away from open revolt by their belief that there is no alternative.

I’m still really enjoying these books, I am however getting a little bit pissed at paying full price for each book. Lets not beat around the bush here, I’m on “book” 3 and while each "book" has a distinct start and finish its one story really. Add this to the fact you can easily read each book in a few hours and the only conclusion is that these books should have been published in omnibus form.