This is Military Science Fiction at it's finest. I know of no other war series debut comparable or exceeding to it save for The Black Company. High praise for the endearing characters, and amazing military tactics and science of John Ringo.

A must read for all those who wondered what it was like in the trenches of Star Wars or wanted to feel Starship Troopers all over again.

This excellent novel takes much from Heinlein's Starship Trooper, and is what I have been looking far in military SciFi.

Outstanding introduction to the Posleen series . . . a hearty endorsement!

In the early 21st century, humanity is approached for help by a very advanced alien civilization - the Galactics - dealing with fierce invasion by a centauroid race called the Posleen. Unfortunately, the Galactics are peaceful and lack the drive for combat, and so they need the humans to fight for them. Given that the invasion is headed for Earth too, humanity has no choice but to join the war effort.

What the aliens lack in warrior spirit they more than make up for in technology, which they provide to the humans. Much of this tech lies outside the realm of hard science - Newton's laws and relativity are cast aside for the sake of action.

And wonderfully detailed action it is. Ringo's military expertise shows in his detailed, play-by-play description of battlefield combat and politics within the ranks. Unfortunately, so does his bias toward ground-based warfare.

This bias results in a massive plot hole: for all technology both sides in the war possess, it seems unlikely that they would limit their encounters to planetary surfaces only. Ringo sweeps that possibility under the rug with the weak excuse that enemy Posleen could easily shoot down aerospace units anyway.

That being said, the novel is an exciting read that builds slowly and then explodes into a mushroom cloud of body count. Ringo is adept at creating well developed characters - and then killing them off in gory fashion.

The novel covers all the bases of the conflict, from soldiers in boot camp to veterans called up for duty to presidential meetings and alien conversations. While this does indeed make the novel interesting, it creates far too many characters to keep track of. Readers will find themselves stumbling onto characters who sound remotely familiar but whose roles are nearly beyond memory because they were last mentioned 5 or 6 chapters earlier. The novel's main character relatively vanishes from mention after the first couple chapters, only to reappear with lethal force in the 2nd half of the book. The upshot of this is that it makes the story unpredictable. You don't expect a character who's been a central part of the action for several chapters to die, but it happens repeatedly.

Fans of hard science fiction need not apply here: the central character survives a close range nuclear detonation at the end via what amounts to technical magic, and numerous plot holes appear from pseudoscience contradictions. For what it's worth, Ringo adds numbers to the story to make it all sound believable: speeds and distances are detailed, but it's obvious that they're mostly back-of-a-napkin calculations at best and probably shouldn't be taken seriously.

Nonetheless, the novel wasn't intended to be a physics textbook. Ringo excels at combat storytelling, and if that's what you're looking for then this is as good as it gets. Provided you focus on that fact, this novel scores 4 stars in my books.

With military stories, good character development, and a non-stop plot, there's not much more one could ask. It's a fun book I'll look forward to re-reading in a couple years.

If you like the Bolo stories, you will probably like this book. I plan to get the rest of the series now.