This attempt at a Tom Clancy military manual is doomed. It's a dual PoV - fortunately not first person or I wouldn't be reading it at all more than likely - but almost as annoying. This means of course that every chapter has one of the two main characters names as a chapter title, alternating in tedious tick-tock fashion like a military march. Barf! It’s boring and it results in unintentionally amusing chapter openings such as this one:
Chapter 4 NoahThat's the dumb stupidity of two person POV. There's probably another chapter in there, starting in just the opposite fashion. That, on top of the mil-speak with endless, tedious acronyms, was simply annoying. Some - but not all - of the acronyms have a superscript number attached to them, but this is useless because it’s not link, and even if it were, they often appear so close to the edge of the screen that if you were to try and tap on it to go see the reference, you would instead swipe the screen. Stupid and ill-conceived. The description should be right there in the text unless this is written only for soldiers.
The author makes the David Weber mistake of assuming the military in 3-D space will conduct itself exactly as it does in 2-D surface warfare, and it’s all naval speak. It’s like the author took Horatio Hornblower and just moved him into space with no other changes, and it’s stupid. Also, once again, despite the marines supposedly being international, it’s really all American all the time, because as you know, the rest of the world can go hornblow itself.
One again in a futuristic (co-called) military drama, there are no robots and zero AI. There's a nod and a wink to it, but it’s never used. In fact there's a distinct aversion using it! At one point, we learn that the 'AI chip' in their battle helmets has been updated for their new location, but this idiot one of the 'twins' refuses to use it to find her way because it's perceived as a weakness! That's about the equivalent of a marine facing off on the battlefield with an enemy soldier and refusing to use their firearm, but pulling out a knife instead. Stupid. Is it because the author is a male writer and there's the cliché that men won't ask for directions, and this is being projected onto the female character? Whatever is the reason, it's not a good one.
But it gets worse. Despite having some majorly advanced technology - and apparently FTL travel, since they're located much closer to the center of the galaxy than Earth is, there are zero robots. Everything is done by humans despite the fact that now, in 2021, we have very effective robots galore, including military drones, and quite advanced AIs. It's the Star Trek stupidity all over again. The only thing more stupid than Star Trek is Star Wars which does have robots, but they're appallingly stupid and annoying. But here we have the marines training in 'PICS' which has no explanation that I recall for the acronym, but which I assume is something like Personal Integrated Combat Suit.
I read, with regard to enemy being able to track the suits and zero in on them for targeting, "But the fractured-array made it difficult to focus on an individual PICS, whether from eyesight or sensors. In his father’s day, a fractured-array merely 'bent' the lights waves. Now, not only were the waves distorted, but fifty times a second, the array shifted, which sent spoofing images randomly...." The thing is, once again, the author is focused only on the visual sense. Yes, he mentions 'sensors', but there’s nothing on how the suit supposedly fools those.
The thing is that a mechanical suit will put out a radar reflection, it will put out a heat signature, it will put out electronic frequencies (especially if the soldiers are communicating with one another as they would have to be). And even if it put out none of this at detectable levels, it would not matter to an enemy because they would simply blanket the ground with high explosive rounds and kill every last one of a bunch of marines trundling up on bulky mech suits! This whole thing made no sense; it sounded like the kind of simplistic idea a writer would put into a children's story, and that was another problem with this: the story seemed to be adult, but the writing was aimed much lower down the age range.
The story is of a pair of twins - so called. They're drawn to look identical on the cover; in fact, I’d wager it’s the same drawing with a few tweaks - but twins of different genders are not monozygotic and they would not look like identical twins. They may look completely different. One of them is the go-getter gung-ho female who is given such a 'man-with-tits' aura that she's really a caricature, and of course her brother is the polar opposite. Both were a bit of a joke.
The 'futuristic' weapons were a bit of a laugh, too. I read this at one point when the girl gets her firearm: "The M99 was a dart thrower, firing a hypervelocity 8mm dart that was accelerated with mag rings and capable of reaching 2,010 meters per second past the muzzle. The body of the dart was nowhere near 8mm across, but once it was fired, fins popped out for stability, and it was the fins that stretched 8mm." The thing is that some 2k m/s is almost twice the fastest muzzle velocity of anything available today and even if it was achieved, should anything 'pop' out of the projectile, even fins, it would more than likely ruin the trajectory at such hyper-speeds. It made no sense.
The female main charcater comes off a a complete jerk who thinks nothing of using her father's famous name to get privileges. I read thsi at one point:
"OK, I’m forwarding it now, Mz Lysand—" he started before looking up in surprise. "Esther Lysander? As in Ryck Lysander?"
So obviously, she thinks nothing of fucking with people to get get her own privileged way and it's not a good idea to render one of your main characters - your heroic ones that is - as completely unlikeable right from the off. I certainly did not like her, and her brother was no better, so I saw no reason to get interested in either of them. This was especially true since the author seemed hell-bent upon setting the sotry up to be utterly predictable, having the gung-ho "against type" (not!) female soldier get schooled and the 'sensitive guy' male soldier become heroic. Barf.
I quit reading this because it offered nothing new and nothing interesting to me. I don't think the author knows how to write a realistic female character for a situation like this. The characters felt flat. One of them was too boring and the other too ridiculous. It was as though the author had decided to write the man as the woman and vice-versa - from a traditional PoV, that is - and it really didn't work. The only character that even remotely intrigued me was the one who went by 'Princess Mayhem', but she was barely in the book - in the first 50% anyway. The story was terribly lethargic, too. You could honestly have skipped the entire first thirteen chapters, which were tiresomely like a prologue, and come in when the first mission started, and not have missed anything important, useful, or entertaining. I ditched it at just past 50%, and I cannot commend it as a worthy read.
