The Lost Fleet: Victorious by Jack Campbell - A review

Disclosure: Minor spoilers are possible, but will be refrained from going into major spoiler territory.

The Lost Fleet: Victorious by Jack Campbell – a review by The Meanderer

Victorious is the last book in a six-book series by retired US Navy officer, John G. Hemry. It brings the series to an adequate close. Keen-eyed observers might notice that the title of the book, Victorious, kind of gives the game away; but who didn’t expect them to get home in the end? Getting home wasn’t the only thing on everybody’s mind though, and the issues presented throughout the other five books are all dealt with in due time. Overall, it was an enjoyable read, and only took a day/night depending on how you look at it.

We meet the Grand Council of the Alliance for the first time, and they are suitably the annoying gits that we should expect of this war-weary civilisation. Seeing new additions to the fleet’s captains reminds us of the horrors that protagonist Black Jack Geary had to deal with when he first took over, a humorous anecdote to the past – something greater could have risen from such feelings in the new captains, but regrettably nothing more was made of it.

UK cover of the book

Unfortunately, the way that Victorious is written, you don’t get the full sense of the back-stabbing politics that is sure to occur, as we know from reports of various characters. It’s a series that’s aimed at military actions, superbly complex space battles fought in full three-dimensional planes and is difficult, to say the least, to keep track of; and as such, the characters aren’t quite gritty and real enough. Hemry is a great action writer, he knows his stuff too, but he doesn’t excel in the character development and execution of characterisation much. The characters that have been with us throughout the whole series are well-rounded enough, as we know a lot more about them – however, for some characters I get the sense that Hemry gave up on some ideas part-way through; like Duellos, who I could have sworn was an agent of the enemy in previous books (he was just shifty). The new additions to the character roster are flat and one-dimensional, they seem to only be there for a single purpose: moving the story onwards.

I get the feeling that there is something missing from the book, it wasn’t quite as climatic and enjoyable as it could have been. Maybe due to some word-count issues, each book is somewhere in the region of 400 pages long, which works out to be an average word count of approximately  120,000 per book. It’s more than adequate to pass the time leisurely, but not something to wow millions of people.