Space Opera Fans discussion

The June 2018 INDIE pick is This Corner of the Universe by Britt Ringel. Please use this thread to post questions, comments, and reviews, at any time.

Official description:
The first command of an officer haunted by his actions on his previous assignment, the mission of BRS Anelace was supposed to be simple and uneventful…

Sent to patrol and protect the interests of Renard Mining Enterprises in the remote Skathi solar system, the new captain should have had ample downtime to bond with his crew. Much to their surprise, Captain Garrett Heskan and his officers discover sabotaged navigation buoys and suspicious freighter activity that suggest a sinister presence in the system. Soon Anelace finds herself outnumbered and outgunned in a race against time to save the civilians operating Renard’s lone ore processing station from the threat that would drive the Republic from the valuable asteroid fields orbiting the Skathi star.

Hey, thanks to everyone who gives this a go. This was my debut novel back in 2013, and the lead book in a five-book series.

I wanted to hop in and post the landing page for the book on my website. I blog about scene inspirations, reader feedback, and other odds and ends about every book and collect the blog post links on each page. There are a few callbacks to military history throughout TCOTU, for example, mentioned in the posts:

https://thiscorneroftheuniverse.com/n...

I just finished it. It was a bit "technical" for my taste, but it was a good story. I really felt the struggle, especially in the second half of the story, for the men and women of the "Anelace" fighting against the odds.
Good military science fiction.

I finished this book a day or two ago. It started out a little slowly -- maybe the first 15% -- then the battle started and took the whole rest of the book, occasionally leavened with technical descriptions of the ships and weapons. If you're really into military sci-fi, you might appreciate it but that's not my preference. It was certainly exciting. A space battle that lasted for almost a whole book. But there was very little character development and almost no back story. I had no problem finishing it, but I haven't decided whether I will read the next installment in the series.

Hey, thanks to both of you for giving it a go! The "a bit technical" critique is certainly a fair one in this first book, I learned to level that out in subsequent installments. I took a lot of the early reviews to heart on that point.

For Betsy, if you enjoyed the setting but don't prefer a military story, a couple of my standalones would be a better choice if you decide to try another. Confidence Game is about smugglers who steal a ship with a mysterious past, and the crew includes a crossover character you've just met. The other standalone book in the TCOTU setting is Chasing Blue Dots, and is the story of a space traffic controller put through life's wringer to get to a decidedly happy ending.