Ship commander who's hunting 'the myriad' discovers a space time anomaly and a planet that is using the anomaly and dooms their existance.

I kind of liked this in spite of myself.
I do enjoy old-school military SF/space opera, as long as the women aren't too hideously portrayed, and well, it was kind of hideous but I still liked it.
I don't know. I'm reading the next one anyway. ( )

I started off not really getting into this novel. I actually put it aside, read a few other books and then for some crazy reason I ended up reading the second novel = which I loved enough to make me want to try reading The Myriad again. Having the second novel in my head was the impetous I needed to continue past where I left off, and this seemed to do the trick. I absolutely loved The Myriad.

I loved the dialogue, the characters and even those crazy plot twists - which, though at first I felt so confused (having read the second book first), when I remembered that I was reading a SciFi book, it all became much clearer. I read The Myriad within a couple of days; I was absorbed by it.

It has it all - fun dialogue, unrequited love, suspense, adventure, fighting and gore, SciFi twists and turns and just plain fun. There's this far into the future war with the Roman Empire vs The United States...not a lot of other countries are mentioned though - but the main plot is this war with the Romans and Earth both trying to get as many planets claimed as possible and the addition of this type of gorging eating monster hive thing. This hive is comprised of millions and millions of eating bugs that seem to have no other purpose than eating - eating anything organic; food, people, wood, plants, each other....anything. And they can travel in space, seemingly impervious to weapons....ugh. Makes cockroaches and pirhanas seem tame in comparison.

Now that I've read the second and first, I'm off to read the third in this series... ( )

This book is horrible. The characters aren't interesting, the plot is alright, but the ending ruins the entire book.

I don't recommend it. ( )

Gah, I hate time travel. Even when it's well done time travel, with all the ramifications thought through like this is.

When you are starting a new series you can either work your hero up through the schools from childhood or you can jump in to a situation and allow the reader to work out how the hero got to be there. There are advantages and disadvantages to both ways, but Meluch has chosen the latter. This means that initially a lot of the background universe remains unexplained, but without any infodumps sufficient pertinent information is clearly imparted.

John Faragut (our hero) is the captain of a US battleship in deep space. He and his crew are hunting mindless bloodthirsty aliens who have already devoured ships and maybe even planets of the newly allied Second Roman Empire. I loved this concept, straight out of all the worst parnoid conspiracy theories you can imagine, for centuries the Roman's have been living in secret amoungst us. When a new colony is founded on a new world the Roman flag goes up and all the Romans abandon Earth to form a new Empire. However the good ole USA is there to keep up the Earth's homely status. This new alien menace has caused the Roman's to beg for US assistance, and all is going well until the Merrimack runs afoul of another alien's minefield right amoungst the Myriad star cluster.

It's fast it's fun, it's horrendously US gung-ho, the US Marines are the cream of the crop and no-one else can hold a candle to them even when they're goofing off. It's surprisingly liberal both racially tolerant and sexually unrestricted. The characters are mindlessly thin, even Faragut who is superhuman and without flaws, only the Roman Augustus has any sense of subtlty.

The ending is extremely annoying, but does leave a good hook for the next book, which I will buy when I come across it.
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After re-read:
Can't add much more than that really. The introduction really does seem like you've jumped in mid-way through a series, but it all becomes apparent (enough) as you go on. Really clever concepts, good pacing, enjoyable people. It's trite. But it's fun trite. ( )