Through Struggle, the Stars
3.0 Stars
1-25-2023

Space opera that is very heavy on the Space and very light on the Opera. The author is one of the prime movers behind the video game Terra Invicta, and the book shares ~85% of its concerns with the video game. Both of them have a heavy focus on nearish-future space ship design and combat, where everything the ships are doing is potentially viable with our current day understanding of physics (wormholes excepted of course). It's also a sort of "fragile" setting, where humans have industrialized space and colonized other planets, but we have in no way settled the national and ethnic conflicts that separate the globe. So you still have nations on Earth that abhor each other and could mutually destroy each other with nuclear weapons, but added to that you also have vulnerable stations in low Earth orbit that are vital to making the Earth-space economy work, asteroids or bombardments that could easily be dropped from space onto Earth, and then a whole logistics chain from the colonies to Sol and back again that can be disrupted or blockaded. So there's a lot of potentially catastrophic points of failure that are all shoved up next to each other, and with no good way to guard them, except by trying to navigate this line between competition and atrocity.

Anyway! There's some space battles, some Jack Ryan type forays into covert ops, and only the lightest of characterizations connecting the various bits. It's less of a story, and more of a chance for the author to talk about space things and the course of a made up future conflict. In terms of politics, the story is somewhat agnostic. There are no real heroes or villains (ok, maybe one or two), just soldiers and astronauts and spies on both sides involved in a gradually escalating WWI type conflict over expansion and national primacy. The author isn't a great writer, but he's not bad or lazy or dumb either. E.g. he has a reasonable understanding of people, but he's not really interested in spending words talking about them. The prose is serviceable, and well above what you find from most amateurs or fan-fic writers, without every really being beautiful.

Ok! Now for fun facts about the cross over in strategy between the game and the books. Is the video game realistic? Take the quiz yourself and find out.

Fact or fiction: the best fleet strategy is to bunch up all your ships up into a tight & slow moving grid, so that they can mutually cover each other with PD while concentrating fire on whatever is in front of them.
Fact! This is born out in the first battle of Yuan-ti, where the American fleet tries some fancy maneuvers with flanking and bullshit and gets absolutely pasted by the Chinese wall of battle.

Fact or fiction: Fleet engagements happen at relatively low intercept speeds and short distances.
Fact! Both simulations and live combat show that high speed passing engagements are basically a death sentence for everyone involved, since it A) increases the deadliness of projectiles while B) decreases the time for PD to fire. So only truly kamikaze fleets go for high speed engagements, others either fight a battle they think they can win or they just run.

Fact or fiction: At one point in the book, two potentially hostile ships ended up floating within 30 km of each other, as one ship tried to occlude the other's firing arc on a disputed ground target. Did this really happen?
Fiction! No, there is absolutely no way that a captain would bring their ship that close to a threat. 30 km? Jesus H Christ, the youth these days. No of course this could never happen in real life.

Fact or fiction: As technology advanced, missile weapons were phased out of warship builds as they were no longer able to pierce ever more effective laser-PD screens.
Fiction! In the real world, missiles do not angle for a direct hit on their target. Rather the missile explodes into a cloud of projectiles while still dozens of kilometers out from its target, forcing the PD systems to try and intercept thousands of incoming threats. While missiles aren't a primary weapon of most fleets, they still play a role in engagements, especially when trying to force chokepoints around wormholes. However the developers of the Terra Invicta game found these shrapnel clouds too computationaly expensive to model, which is why the in-game missiles must score a direct hit and are less effective than their real world counter-parts.

Fact or fiction: Future wars will be fought by essentially random combinations of nations.
Fact! The war in the book is fought with China and Korea on one side, with Japan, American, Australia, and Iran on the other. The game Terra Invicta accurately models this and gets this aspect of sci-fi combat completely right.