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Finished ATLAS by Isaac Hooke. This is one of the freebies of the month; not sure off the top of my head whether it's the Kindles Select or the Samsung Select, but you get the idea. The premise of the program is to get you hooked on a series so you buy the following books (or for Amazon to have some reviews before the book goes for public sale).
This one is not terrible. The author may have gone through basic training, but I'm leaning more toward the idea that he just did some fairly thorough research (the use of 'sir' is a bit off in places).
At any rate, it is a first-person science-fiction about a man who joins an elite group of commandos who happen to have 'mecha' as one of their tools in trade. The story follows the young man from his humble beginnings as an illegal immigrant to a country who drafts said illegals into their military, and he goes through (space) Navy boot camp, and then through the future equivalent of SEAL training. Finally, about two-thirds of the way through the book, they actually go on a mission into space and things go into the toilet. Being former military myself, and having known people who have gone through BUD/S, this was acceptable reading, though it did take up the majority of the novel.
The ending was good, I and will consider reading one of the other books.
TL;DR: if you don't care to read about going through boot camp and special forces training, then don't read this book.
Next up: Saint Odd by Dean Koontz. Also, I am reading a dead-tree A History of Pi by Petr Beckmann. Originally published in 1970, this is a 1993 reprinting of the 1974 third edition.
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