The Navy of Humankind is Light on Drama & Pages But Decent Military Sci-Fi

Back in April I got Fire Ant, the first book of the series called The Navy of Humankind:  Wasp Squadron for free, probably from a Bookbub newsletter or something.  The book isn't very long, which is why I guess it was nominated for a Nebula as a novella and not a novel.

The story is about a young woman named Floribeth Dalisay who comes from a human colony that was mostly Filipino or something.  Because she's short--only about 4'6"--she gets work piloting a scout ship, mapping remote systems.  The idea is I guess that the smaller and lighter pilot makes it cheaper and more efficient.  On one of these scouting trips, she stumbles across aliens!

Instead of being grateful, her superiors get pissed at her for fucking up her ship's AI so she could escape.  They want to charge her an amount she can basically never repay for the damage to the ship and its systems.  The Navy offers to get rid of the debt if Beth will fly for them.  Which she does.  Other pilots don't take to her right away but then she manages to save a fellow pilot during a skirmish with the aliens.

It was a decent novella, though it really could have been longer and included more about Beth and her training and stuff like that.  Still, I thought it was a good introduction.

Months later there was a Countdown deal on Amazon so I got the other 4 books for like $5. Each book is less than 200 pages, so really novellas and not novels.  While I enjoyed the space battles, the human drama is a bit thin.  

What I complained about after reading the fourth one is all Beth seems to do is hang out on the mothership and fly missions.  A couple of times in the series she goes home and once back to Earth, but she doesn't really do a lot.  There's really no love interest for her and as I lamented, I couldn't even tell you whether she likes guys, girls, or both because she seems to have no interest in anything except flying missions.

In the fourth book, she's assigned to infiltrate a captured planet and rescue a scientist.  Ah-ha!  This could lead to something!  She meets and saves a hunky young doctor and they fall in love...or not.  Nope, the doctor is middle-aged, married, and a whiny jerk.  D'OH!

In the fifth book is the closest we come to Beth having any kind of relationship.  After flying some scout missions, she meets a woman named Wyma who's studying the aliens.  They quickly become friends and Beth even takes a nap in Wyma's room...and then Beth gets a transfer to another ship and we don't hear anything from Wyma until almost the end of the book when Beth needs someone to analyze a weird sorta dance the alien fighters are doing.

For the most part I enjoyed the books, but I wished there was more to them besides some decent battles in nifty little fighters.  It's obvious the author knows his stuff about the military and flying, but he's a little deficient in the human drama aspects.  Probably could have used a partner to punch up that stuff.  Or at least an editor who could have helped with that.

Great space operas like the original Star Wars trilogy, the Robotech saga, Deep Space Nine, Babylon 5, The Expanse, and the Battlestar Galactica reboot all bring in human elements.  It doesn't have to be some big twist like the main bad guy is the main good guy's father, but some romantic entanglements and such help to flesh out the characters.  I get these are more military sci-fi than space opera, but that doesn't mean they have to be almost completely bereft of human drama.  You need a little of that to help round out the characters.

At the end, Beth becomes an ensign and it mentions that will cut her enlistment time.  Great, but what's she going to do next?  Flying seems to be all she does or has an interest in.  She doesn't even have any hobbies like playing an instrument, cooking, or writing.  So if she leaves the Navy, what's she going to do?  Go back to flying scout ships?  There is no mention of what might come next, so I guess it's up to readers to fill in the blanks.

Anyway, it reminded me of those Union Station books I talked about.  It was a similar problem of the books being mostly entertaining but lacking the dramatic elements to make them better.  In that case it was a lack of conflict, while these books at least have a major conflict (humans vs. "Crystals," as the aliens are known) but don't really have much of the littler conflicts to make them better stories.

And, also, we get Beth is short after the first book.  We don't need reminded of it 50 times during each successive book!  And Coca-Cola is still around hundreds of years into the future?  I'm just saying.