From the back of the book: "The Alliance has been fighting the Syndics for a century - and losing badly. Now its fleet is crippled and stranded in enemy territory. Their only hope is a man who's emerged from a century-long hibernation to find he had been heroically idealized beyond belief . Captain John "Black Jack" Geary's legendary exploits are known to every schoolchild. Revered for his heroic "last stand" in the early days of the war, he was presumed dead. But a century later, Geary miraculously returns from survival hibernation and reluctantly takes command of the Alliance fleet as it faces annihilation by the Syndics. Appalled by the hero-worship around him, Geary is nevertheless a man who will do his duty. And he knows that bringing the stolen Syndic hypernet key safely home is the Alliance's one chance to win the war. But to do that, Geary will have to live up to the impossibly heroic "Black Jack" legend."
So there you go. It's kind of Battlestar Galactica-esque in that it's a battle fleet cut off and travelling through enemy territory. The Fearless is written from the perspective of Jack Geary as he deals with mutiny and trying to strike and an enemy stronghold system. That is the plot. I haven't read any other books in the series and I could follow what happened easily enough. There were certain plot points that weren't entirely clear (How exactly did a man out of time qualify to take over as Admiral?) but for the most part you can read this as standalone. Ideally you should read the series in order though.
Jack Geary is a complicated character made a little too idealized. He sometimes feels like less than a real man and more like a living paean to strong leadership. That said his character and his orbiting cast of friends/lovers/enemies work well together. There is a problem with the first person perspective though. We have virtually no background on Geary. We have no background on the Alliance he loves and serves. We have no details on the enemy Syndics other than the surmise, based on their name, that the Syndicate is a made up of hundreds of dictatorial super-corporations. Everything is focused on Navy life and even that lacks detail. Because Geary is a high ranking officer he never actually has any conversations with the common sailors. The reader knows they are there but they are rarely seen and never speak. All information about how the sailors feel about various fleet actions are relayed second hand through ship captains. Thus when the big mutiny goes down it's entirely anti-climactic. This lack of backstory is frustrating in a book that is part of a series. Too much world building can be boring and stifling but Lost Fleet's universe is a threadbare thing. A hastily constructed scaffold to be blasted apart.
Lost Fleet: Fearless works well as a military sci-fi story and not much else. If you have that itch to scratch, that desire to see the hellances boiling through durosteel plate as missile drones flit through the void, then Fearless will keep you happy. But its a flimsy thing and when your finished don't be surprised if the whole thing felt a little empty. Lost Fleet: Fearless hits 6 out of 10 stealth mines.
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Lost Fleet does have several interesting elements that I would like to do an aside on. The first is space warfare. I feel like space warfare would be a natural extension of the sort of 'push button' war that we imagine WW3 will be. Lost Fleet has an interesting twist on this though. Because the distances in ship to ship combat are so vast the speed of light actually plays an important part in fighting. If you launch attacks from too far away the image of the missiles and their vectors reaches the intended target long before the actual attack. Thus ships actually need to close the distance on one another to land any hits. And even then they are going so fast (fractions of the speed of light) that even with computers aiming is extremely tricky. All of this seems a lot closer to what space combat would be like than most sci-fi ever gets. Generally space combat ignores the laws of physics whenever it can. Which can be entertaining but it's nice to see someone has actually put some serious thought into how it might actually work.
Pictured: Not realistic!!!
The other interesting thing is how many damn solar systems are wrecked. Lost Fleet depicts total warfare on a galactic scale. It isn't about taking and holding territory- it's about destroying the enemies ability to make war. In Syndic system after system the Fleet rolls on in and annihilates every war factory, orbital installation, spaceport, and supply depot. Galactic scale sci-fi often features empires and whatnot recovering from apocalyptic wars from centuries past (everything from the Foundation to Dune really). Rarely do we, the reader, see first hand what such a war would look like. This is it though. I imagine by the time this series ends thousands of human worlds will have been blasted back to the stone age.
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