Courageous (The Lost Fleet, Book 3) (edition 2007)

I'm still enjoying this series. Jack Campbell does a great job at describing the challenges of the fleet. It's realistic and harsh, highly believable. My only complaints are character-wise. I'd like to know more about the people in the fleet. The politics of command is well described and clever, but I find it lacks a more personal element. Even so, I'd definitely recommend the series to anyone whole likes military science-fiction. ( )

I needed a light and easy read, and boy did I get one! Following the same formula as the first two books in the series this book meandered and didn't take the underlying story very far. The question now is whether to bother with the rest of the series...........................Still it is an easy read, and kept me amused for a while. ( )

The third book in The Lost Fleet series by military science-fiction writer Jack Campbell, Courageous continues the story of the Alliance fleet, lead by Capt. John Geary, as it works to evade the Syndics and make its was home.
Unfortunately, for a vast majority of the novel, the only thing Courageous gives us is a “continuation” of the story in the strictest sense of the term. In fact, it’s largely a rehash of the previous two books, Dauntless and Fearless. Although Campbell’s writing hasn’t necessarily taken a turn for the worst, the story and plot conventions in Courageous are boring and repetitious. Essentially, this book is a 300 page summary of the previous two books, but worded differently. We have the same characters, same personalities, and same type of space battles, only the scenery has changed. Not that it makes much of difference anyway.
To make matters even worse, the character of Victoria Rione, Geary’s lover, has decided to develop some kind of schizophrenic, bipolar disorder on us. She constantly flip-flops between supporting Geary and second-guessing his decisions. One minute, she’ll go along with his plan and the next she’ll be calling him power-mad and crazy. Campbell’s intention to make Rione a sort of moral compass for Geary, has instead warped her into a nagging, nutjob. I found it hard to swallow or even take seriously. If she’s not yelling at him, she’s sneering. The rest of the characters don’t fare well either as their personalities aren’t developed any further and instead, like the plot, we get a rehash of what we already know if we followed the previous two books.
Perhaps the one good aspect of this book comes in the last 100 or so pages. Here we have a battle in which the Alliance fleet has found itself in a very bad situation. It’s low on ammo, fuel, and is badly outgunned, with little means of escape. It’s the most serious trouble the fleet has been in since the start of the first novel. It is a somewhat tense situation, but unfortunately, it’s short-lived. Furthermore, the evidence of an outside alien race influencing the war is only briefly touched upon in a handful of pages and then the novel ends on a cliffhanger.
Obviously my biggest gripe with Courageous is that it doesn’t take us anywhere. The battle stations are manned, the fleet is assembled, and the engines are running, but we don’t make any progress in terms of character or story development. Dare I say that this book is unnecessary and redundant to the Lost Fleet series? I’ve read similar reviews of the fourth book Valiant, and that both this and that novel could actually be either combined into one, or even skipped entirely if the reader so desires. However, this reader has decided to review each novel on a separate basis, as I progress through the series. Just to try and be fair to Campbell.
Overall, I’d give Courageous 3 out of 5, which is being rather generous in my opinion. The writing is the same as the previous two novels in the series; however what Campbell gives us is a differently worded revision of those particular books. If you’ve read those, then you already know pretty much everything there is to know about this book. I guess I’ll have to see if the next book, Valiant picks up some of the pieces at all. ( )

All of the books in the Lost Fleet series contain more or less the same elements arranged in different ways; political intrigue, treacherous power plays, and a repeating Buck Rogers motif of a man-out-of-time; all interspersed with the Campbell's hallmark kick-ass sublightspeed space battles. It would be potboiler-grade material if it wasn't so compelling and the characters so crisply sketched out as to make even the bad guys (on either side of the seemingly endless interstellar war) relatable to.The only drawback is that the series is now five books long and shows no sign of a conclusion, which puts it at risk of alienating its audience, much like Robert Jordan's Wheel Of Time books did. ( )

I really liked the first and second in "The Lost Fleet" series.
But when I started reading this I felt no real interest in the characters anymore.
The only thing I wanted was to get to the finish as quick as possible so I could see if anything new happened.

It really felt like I read this in the last two books..

But if you really are in to space warfare, this is the series to read. And don't get tired of repeating action, time after time..