Ok if the first review can be classified as fictional science with out being likely to be in error this series is pure science fiction. The series is by Jack Campell and is composed of the books: Lost Fleet Dauntless, LF Couragous, LF Valient, LF Fearless, and the last one LF Relentless.
The premise of the book is that in the future humanity has split into two warring factions and that one of them has launched the bulk of its fleet into the homesystem of the other to attempt to bring the century old war to a swift final conclusion. It is ambushed but in the mean time picks up a life pod containing the "hero of the alliance" Black Jack Geary in cold sleep. So eventually or actually rather suddenly John Geary finds himself the most senior captain in the fleet and reluctantly takes command. In the last 100 years basically the intericacies of space combat has been lost and tactics consist of "hie diddle diddle straight up the middle." So he spends a good chunk of his time fighting not only the enemy but his own officers who are sort of "The morale is to the material as three is to one." Neat concept but it rather fails in fleet battles.
So he has to make it through the entirety of Sindicate space to get the fleet back to Alliance territory. While dealing with internal rivalries, emotional situations, the enemy fleet, his own officers, and a host of other things.
What I like about the stories is that the space battles are space battles. They deal with things like time dialation (most battles are fought at no more than 0.08c to enable the automatic targeting system to hit), the delay of transmitting commands, sensor lag, etc. They read like space battles. There is a good mix of things with some ground action, planetary bombardment, etc. And oddly enough John Geary as the fleet commander never leaves his flag ship to go on away teams....strange how that is. There is a lot of rip van winkle bits added it with very nice touches I think. I doubt these stories will be up for the Nebula award any time soon but they are a solid read in my books. I think they have well done characters who are multi-dimensional rather than one sided characatures, intellegently done dialogue, a bit sparce descriptions of things. I'm not sure I could describe most of the characters in the stories or even tell you what say the ships look like or the uniforms appear to be but again that is typical male writer for you. The star systems, the tactics and all the gritty realism of the books I think will appeal to most people who play Aurora.
It not space opera per say but there are elements of that too. I find that John Geary never grates on me like H. Herringswine does. He does win battles because his enemy is unable to match his tactics but he never does it in a way that makes you feel anything but he deserved to win because he was clearly the better commander and yet at the same time he is clearly human. He feels, he leads, he inspires in ways that I find believable. His enemy may be defeated tactically they may make mistakes but they make mistakes you would expect and not always just so he can win. Some of his victories are brutal one sided slaughters and others are by the skin on his teeth. The enemy rarely does absolutely idiotic things just so he can win and presents in each book a generally interesting tactical deliema to be solved.
For at least in my view a good military SF read that isn't so long (each book is about 300 pages long) and has a good blend of action and plot with solid pacing I don't think you can do to wrongly.
