Dave Bara

Void Ship is a promising but flawed military science fiction novel by Dave Bara. Pirates ambush a diplomat on his way to negotiate a treaty. He escapes by ordering his damaged warship into an interstellar void from which no ship has ever emerged. He and his crew are rescued by the eponymous void ship crewed by androids. The characters discuss gravity and cosmology, but it is a fantasy, nonetheless. There are too many love interests to be believable, and the technology would be right at home in a book by E. E., Doc, Smith.
The book itself seems to have dropped into the void. Six years out, it has only eight ratings on Goodreads, six on Amazon, and three on LibraryThing.… (more)

This is not literature. This is not high quality fiction, to be discussed in parlor's while sipping brandy. Not even during an afternoon respite, perhaps with some mint juleps or even just a cup of tea and biscuits.

For the record, I also didn't agree that this was a successor to the likes of Asimov (I've seen that reference).

So what *was* it, and why did I give it 4 stars? Bara's book was in line with Dickson's Childe Cycle, starting at Dorsai!, and that's not too shabby (Dorsai! will always be ranked in my top favorite books of all time). Impulse is a military space opera. Big events, big stakes, some big curtain tugs and waving of hands, and some big dumb objects. While I don't know if any one element of the story stood out for me (though it did remind me a bit of another guilty pleasure, Terry Nixon's Empire of Bones books), I found myself unable to put the book down. Maybe it helped that in this rare case, I was actually carting around a paperback copy of the book, but I found myself reading the entire book in just three days. In a week where I've been sick and missing all of my regular cadences, that says something.

With summer starting up here in the Northern Hemisphere, Impulse makes a great beach read. You're not reading a book like this because you want to explore the human condition - you're reading it for some fun adventure, and it delivers.… (more)

If you haven’t read much military SF then this book is going to seem really great. If you have read several books then you know what will happen in the book. I could see every plot twist as it came along. All the women love our hero, he has loyal friends that he co-ops into his secret mission without bothering to tell them, yet he is clueless about his friends backgrounds even though they have been friends for years in the academy. There is advanced technology that is doled out to the planets by the wise Historians. And yet they are in search of the ancient artifacts that give them access to the Founders technology that they use. The book ends with winning the battle but you can see the long war ahead of them.

Digital review copy provided by the publisher through NetGalley… (more)