I Am Revu’d

Locus Online has published Russell Letson’s lengthy, thoughtful review of Imperium Restored. I quote from a key paragraph:

I will repeat (again) the observation I made at the very start, two decades back: that despite marketing language and cover iconography, these are not only space-operatic military adventures but also novels of manners, which makes them future-setting cousins of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin wooden-ships novels . . . Here character and social observation and the intersection of the private-personal-professional and the large-scale-public are as crucial as the melodrama of battles and Blowing Stuff Up. The Praxis novels are not only about what the protagonists do in war, but about what warfare and its machineries and its disrup­tions do to them and for them.

Which, for the record, is what I set out to do. I didn’t want to write military SF, but SF about people who happened to be in the military.

I would love to quote more paragraphs, but it would take them a little too out of context, so I will recommend clicking the link and enjoying the review for itself.