decentă, nimic remarcabil pozitiv sau negativ. o carte ce mi-ar fi plăcut în adolescență, dar acum nu am putut trece de jumătate. ( )

The end of a rigid empire in internecine war.
The last of a might alien species, the Shaa, decides it is time to die. The Shaa counquered Terrans, Naxids, and other races 10,000 years ago, and established a convocation of races with a mighty multispecies fleet to manage their Empire. Everything is decided by a rigid heirarchy of grand families. A year after the great funeral, the Naxids decide on a secret mutiny, destroying much of the fleet, and are racing to take over the capital world. Lt. Gareth Marttinez comes from a wealthy but poorly placed family. At the beginning of the novel, he guides cadet Carolyn Sula in a daring rescue of a space yacht racing pilot. A year later he maneuvers his frigate to escape the mutiney and make it to the capital. He is given a tactical officer staff position, and falls in love with Sula, who is posted aboard the flagship. They devise new tactics together, but at the end Sula walks away from him, because, as the back story explains, she is a beautiful and brilliant commoner who has stolen the identity of the real but disgraced Sula family.
The battle and space scenes are scientifically realistic, if you grant the existence of wormholes. Antimatter fuels ships, missiles and warheads, and is generated by accelerator rings that surround entire planets. Wormhole relay stations transmit laser messages, and balance the mass of the ships passing through by hurling equal amounts of rock in the other direction. Everyone uses drugs to endure massive accelerations during maneuvers. There is even the mention of air embolism during decompression. The characters and plot are reasonably complicated. ( )

Exciting adventure. The long set up is worth it. Heart pounding action by the last third. The main characters have high quality flaws to go along with all their brilliance and chutzpah. ( )

Space opera set in the far future when there is only one powerful empire. Multiple races are subjugated by one race, that imposes by force a set of rules (no artificial intelligence, no immortality, etc.) for thousands of years. Starts a bit slow but has enjoyable actions and characters. The whole story makes a lot of sense and characters are both believable and they somehow evolve based on their challenges. Lots of descriptions of a (very) hierarchical society. Does not introduce a lot of strange technologies (except wormholes and really dense energy producing - but not much else). Was kind of nice that half of the book was just to introduce the characters and the initial action did not miraculously link with the second part when the war started ( )

Williams, Walter Jon. The Praxis. Dread Empire’s Fall No. 1. Harper, 2002.
Walter Jon Williams is a journeyman author of science fiction. He is well versed in all the tropes of the genre, builds consistent fictional worlds and always tells a good story. The Dread Empire’s Fall has a lot in common with other series of its kind—notably, David Weber’s Honor Harrington novels and Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga. It is less wedded to the C. S. Forester model than Weber’s work and has a harder edge than Bujold’s novels. The premise is that an ancient race got to all the wormholes first and imposed a ruthless clan-based aristocracy on all the sentient species in the galaxy. Wen the last alien overlord dies, chaos erupts in the empire. Think Russia in the post-Soviet era. The series is held together by two strong characters, the second son of a mercantile family whose talents are unappreciated by the aristocratic military leadership, and a woman from the mean streets masquerading as an aristocrat. Both are highly skilled starship commanders. They are attracted to one another but also highly competitive. This frenemy relationship keeps our interest through the series. If epic space opera is your thing, you will be hooked by The Praxis. ( )