![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Word Count for Space Rescue
Complete (22.6K) Goal (80K)
29.46% complete
Since Last Post = 972 words
A while back, the writer John Scalzi posted a snarky Amazon review for the amusement of his readership. In that review, the unhappy reader mentioned one Robert A. Frezza (specifically his books Small Colonial War and Fire in a Faraway Place) as the epitome of good military SF.
I don't usually hang out in secondhand book stores, but I happened to be in one over the weekend, and I picked up Mr. Frezza' magnum opuses (magnum opi? - Latin is not my strong suit). Over the weekend I read A Small Colonial War. This appears to have been his first book, and was published in paperback in 1990.
It's OK, but as the title says, it's not Scalzi-level. Frezza has not mastered the key viewpoint character, so literally dozens of his cast of hundreds (there's a three-page "Principal Characters" section as well as a two-page Table of Organization) have the POV, frequently in the same scene. This book has no chapters, rather sections titled after days of the week (but no elapsed time) broken up by "Quiddities." (Google defines these as "evasions by making irrelevant distinctions or objections.) The plot is rather conventional, and very similar to some of Pournelle's military fiction of the same era.
Regrading Frezza himself, the biography of him says he did a stint in the US Army in Germany, then got a job as a civilian lawyer for the Army and lives in Glen Burnie, Maryland. As near as I can tell, he wrote four novels, and then faded quietly from the scene.
In short, A Small Colonial War is a good first novel, but by no means a world-beating work of fiction.
Complete (22.6K) Goal (80K)
29.46% completeSince Last Post = 972 words
A while back, the writer John Scalzi posted a snarky Amazon review for the amusement of his readership. In that review, the unhappy reader mentioned one Robert A. Frezza (specifically his books Small Colonial War and Fire in a Faraway Place) as the epitome of good military SF.
I don't usually hang out in secondhand book stores, but I happened to be in one over the weekend, and I picked up Mr. Frezza' magnum opuses (magnum opi? - Latin is not my strong suit). Over the weekend I read A Small Colonial War. This appears to have been his first book, and was published in paperback in 1990.
It's OK, but as the title says, it's not Scalzi-level. Frezza has not mastered the key viewpoint character, so literally dozens of his cast of hundreds (there's a three-page "Principal Characters" section as well as a two-page Table of Organization) have the POV, frequently in the same scene. This book has no chapters, rather sections titled after days of the week (but no elapsed time) broken up by "Quiddities." (Google defines these as "evasions by making irrelevant distinctions or objections.) The plot is rather conventional, and very similar to some of Pournelle's military fiction of the same era.
Regrading Frezza himself, the biography of him says he did a stint in the US Army in Germany, then got a job as a civilian lawyer for the Army and lives in Glen Burnie, Maryland. As near as I can tell, he wrote four novels, and then faded quietly from the scene.
In short, A Small Colonial War is a good first novel, but by no means a world-beating work of fiction.
