Quote:
Originally Posted by Jadon
I finished the first, and while I liked the minor twists at the end, much of the last quarter of the book was battle scene boredom. In a battle, all I'm interested in knowing is who won, who lost, who lived, who died, and what the issues were. I'm not interested in long lists of ship names and types, firing long lists of weapon types. With quick cuts and proper music it's not too bad in a movie, but in a novel it's basically a way to cure insomnia.
It's like the Lord Kalvan novels by H. Beam Piper and sequels by John F. Carr. The interesting stuff is the modern man (who falls into a medieval alternate history complete with castles and knights in Pennsylvania) figuring out how to make workable paper and so on. Every time a battle scene is inserted, I just get bored. Which makes it a pity that as the series went on, you got less of the socio stuff, and more play-by-play battles, such that I didn't bother buying the latest volume.
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Ah, you see, that's what I forgot about that part. Yeah, the military mumbo jumbo kind of brings the story down. I don't mind action scenes (in military settings), but people who write those do tend to forget that not everybody knows or even cares about this military branch and that one.
There's some (minor) action in the next installments, but not as extensive as in the first. I actually thought the second or third story were the best, but the thing is that you can't grasp the magnitude by skipping some of them.