If that isn't enough of a challenge, Geary faces many others. The Alliance fleet is dangerously low on munitions and fuel. Part of his force have unreasonable expectations: They view him as a hero sent by the living stars, a miracle destined to save them all. Some in the fleet want to make him dictator of the Alliance. Others view him as a danger to be eliminated—and they don't mind destroying their own ships in the process. Too, Geary's personal ship, Dauntless, has a passenger of no little power: Victoria Rione, co-president of the Callas Republic and Alliance senator. She is both a dangerously savvy political operative and Geary's ex-lover, which makes for potentially fleet-endangering conflict between the fleet's civilian and military heads. And Rione sees the captain of Geary's ship, Tanya Desjani, as her romantic rival—a perception that may, for all Geary's and Desjani's denials and intentions, be accurate.

However, the biggest challenge, for not only Geary and the Alliance fleet, but the Syndic fleet and the whole Lakota system, is the Syndicate's dirty plan for defeating Geary's forces. They've directed their fleet to make the hypernet interstellar-transit gate collapse. The Syndic fleet doesn't realize that the resulting energy discharge may reach nova scale, destroying everyone and everything in the Lakota system. And nobody—whether in space or on a planet—will escape the system before the hypernet gate explodes. ...

Should please military and hard-SF fans

The fourth novel in a projected sequence of six, Jack Campbell's The Lost Fleet: Valiant continues the story of Capt. John "Black Jack" Geary and the Alliance-Syndic war, set in a medium-distant future of interstellar human colonization. The series is military SF, rigorously extrapolated in the classic tradition of hard SF. The laws of physics and the effects of relativity govern the battles and shape the action, while military virtues and ideals like honor and courage shape the conduct and personalities of the more admirable characters.

Jack Campbell does a good job of fulfilling the requirements of both military SF and hard SF in The Lost Fleet: Valiant, and the novel will please fans of both forms. However, the book (and the series) may not draw a sizable readership from other genres or subgenres, because the characters are somewhat stiff and thin. They lack the three-dimensional complexity that has won large crossover audiences for military hard-SF authors like Catherine Asaro, Lois McMaster Bujold, Elizabeth Moon and David Weber.

Another reason the Lost Fleet series may not gain a broad readership is its fidelity to scientific fact. Campbell's believable, physics-governed interstellar warfare differs notably from media SF's quick and flashy space battles. Readers lured into SF by Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica may find the combat in The Lost Fleet: Valiant boring. Sometimes, unfortunately, an author's accuracy can work against him. Reality, like the moon, is a harsh mistress.