Darkness Beyond – Glynn Stewart

DB begins a second Duchy-of-Terra trilogy, fifteen years after the end of the first trilogy. It’s basically a series of space battles: Characters outside the fleet/s only make cameo appearances.

Space battles don’t make for good fiction. If the bad guys show up in overwhelming numbers and wipe out the defenders, or if the good guys are well defended and shrug off the attack, or if the sides are balanced and settle into a stalemate or a war of attrition, you probably get dull space opera. So the default formula - to which DB adheres - is to give the enemy an apparently-decisive advantage, but to have the heroes win anyhow. That in turn requires the enemy to make a lot of bad decisions, and/or for the advantage to be illusory. DB does both.

DB also takes the third common approach, of having the hero come up with clever tactics and having the enemy fall for them. This also addresses another constraint of space opera, which is that the outcome eventually has to depend on individual protagonists.

In DB, the protagonists in question are two older-generation officers from the first trilogy, and Morgan Casimir, who was a child in the first trilogy.

The series has promise.