Post by PMP Webmaster on Feb 2, 2005 11:35:36 GMT -5
www.novelier.com/
David Sherman, Ex-Marine and Vietnam vet, has written a series of military sci-fi novels with fellow author and Ex-Army Vietnam vet Dan Cragg called the "Starfist" series. There are now about 10 Starfist novels published, and Sherman and Cragg both have numerous other publications under their belts.
I just finished the first Starfist novel, "First to Fight". Pretty good military sci-fi written by people who really know the armed forces and want to give the reader a pretty realistic view of life during wartime. The book reminded me a lot of David Drake's "Hammer's Slammers" military sci-fi series, and I would venture a guess that Starfist is at least influenced by the Slammers novels. One marked difference I found, however was that the Drake books are a lot bleaker, a lot more gloomy and fatalistic than First to Fight was. That's not to say this book is all candy canes and unicorns - lots of people on both sides die in messy, brutal, and horrifying fashions, but there is a kind of dignity among the characters in First to Fight that seemed absent in the Drake novels. This might be simply a product of the feel each author wanted to put into their works, or it might be because the Slammers novels were written much sooner after the Vietnam war, and Drake has stated that they are, in a large part, a means of getting out and expressing a lot of his feelings on the war. This isn't to say I don't like the Drake stuff - on the contrary, I think it's some of the best military sci-fi I've read - it's just pointing out two similar kinds of novels with very different viewpoints.
Anyhow, if you like military science fiction with good action and a quick read, give the Starfist books a try.