Deep Space by Ian Douglas

Published by Harper Voyager on April 30, 2013

Deep Space, the fourth entry in the Star Carrier series, is a solid example of military science fiction. While characterization is a bit weak, Ian Douglas excels at writing vivid battle scenes. By adding political intrigue and credible aliens to the mix, he's produced a novel of greater interest than the "humans versus space bugs" shootout that too often characterizes military sf.

Some of the Sh'daar client species -- perhaps joined by some hitherto unknown aliens -- are attacking Earth outposts and ships, but nobody knows why. The Sh'daar are alien Luddites, fearful of alien races who might be approaching a technological singularity, but the Earth Confederation has lately been at relative peace with the Sh'daar. For Lt. Donald Gregory, a Marine from Osiris, the fight is personal: he wants to liberate his homeworld. The fight is equally personal for Lt. Megan Connor, but for a different reason: she's been captured. When the Earth Confederation confronts the enemy, it discovers that the aliens are using technology that's more advanced than anything humans have encountered before. To make matters even more vexing, something called the Black Rosette might endanger both the Sh'daar and the Earth.

Deep Space is a high energy novel that builds excitement as battles rage on multiple fronts, but it isn't just an action novel. In a significant section of the story, a deep space battle gives way to diplomacy -- an unusual development in military science fiction, but a welcome relief from predictable scenes of interstellar war. Whether diplomacy is possible with an alien race that humankind doesn't fully understand is the novel's most interesting question.

Deep Space is also notable for its carefully considered political intrigue. Conflicts abound as the Earth Confederation seeks to put North American ships under Confederation command -- an act that doesn't sit well with North American President Koenig or with Captain Sandy Gray, who has no desire to surrender control of the Navy's flagship. At the same time, the Confederation is making a power grab on the moon, a prelude to civil war on Earth. The twin plot threads, in space and on the Earth, assure that the story always proceeds at a lively pace. The most immediate threads are resolved by the novel's end but Deep Space leaves enough collateral threads dangling to provide fertile ground for the series' continuance.

Although always written in the third person, the story frequently shifts its focus from one to another of several characters who are integral to the plot. None of the characters are developed to the same degree as the military technology but this isn't a character-driven novel. Stock characters with unsurprising personalities who behave in expected ways serve the story capably, even if their lack of depth is disappointing.

As you would expect in a series novel, there are some sections of expository writing that revisit events from earlier novels in the series. Although they slow the story for awhile, they are bearable. More disturbing is the expository writing that interrupts action scenes, explaining the physics of the action and the astronautics of spaceflight, discussing the history of the Marine Corps, reviewing the ways in which alien races communicate, and describing the operation of weapons in loving detail. I welcome the injection of credible science into science fiction and I'm always happy to learn new things, but it's possible to impart information without pausing the narrative flow. Douglas needs to learn how to do that. He also has a frustrating tendency toward redundancy. This isn't such a long novel that readers need to be reminded of things we've already learned.

Some aspects of the novel are quite creative, even if they sometimes place a clever spin on familiar ideas: an alien's attempt to make sense of human anatomy; the aliens themselves; the planet-killing technology; the improvised tactics that Gregory and Gray devise to fight the aliens; the different philosophies of war that drive humans and aliens; the prejudices that exclude from military advancement those who cling to widely rejected traditions and beliefs; the possibility that Earth is at war against aliens who shaped (or instigated) human evolution. Other aspects are fairly typical of military science fiction, but this is a particularly well-conceived addition to the genre. In the end, it is the novel's intensity as much as its creativity that captured my imagination.

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