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Dominant Species, by Michael E. Marks Book Review | SFReader.com
Dominant Species, by Michael E. Marks Genre: Science Fiction Publisher: Centurion Press Published: 2011 Review Posted: 10/13/2013 Reviewer Rating:
Reader Rating: Not Rated
Dominant Species, by Michael E. Marks
Book Review by Jaqhama
Have you read this book?
Okay...I finished the three sample chapters and then went
straight to the Amazon Kindle
store and bought the entire novel download. Amazon
delivered it to my PC Kindle about thirty seconds later.
Cost me all of US$1.99
I had to purchase the book for two reasons...the first being I'm enjoying the
story and the characters.
The second being that those of you (like Dungeoneer) who used to read my SF
stories over at Pulp and Dagger.com
may remember I wrote a SF novella called RAT's.
About a small Special Forces fast response unit. A Rapid Action Team. You might
also recall that toward the end of the story two of the team members, Jazz and
the Iceman, were wearing nanite impregnated armored battle suits.
Well guess what...the marine unit in Dominant Species is a Rapid Assault Team
and they wear nanotube enhanced armored battle suits.
Quite a coincidence yeah?
I certainly thought so.
But there are more things in heaven and earth, etc, so I'm prepared to accept
that it's quite possible two different authors came up with similar ideas.
I wrote RAT's just after I saw the movie, DOOM.
The marines in that were the Rapid Response Tactical Squad. They overlooked a
cool unit name there I thought, and right away started to get the idea for my
RAT's story.
I digress...
So anyway, apart from the fact that I'm curious to see if the author of
Dominant Species has any more similar surprises in store for me I'm quite
enjoying both the writing style and the story itself.
Of course there's no massive character development, why would there be? The
story is about a small unit of super tough Space Marines on a fire mission to
knock out the defenses on a Rimmer (Rim World natives) held planet, before an
all out attack by a much larger marine strike force.
Two of the main characters knew each other before, back when they played NFL
Hyperball, a 3 dimensional version of American Football. I liked the way that
game was described. Sounded interesting. Players compete in an anti-grav environment. Would be super cool to play a game that way.
The story line is fairly simple...the RAT's are on a fire mission to a take out
some vital equipment on a mining world before the rest of the marines turn up.
During the mission they fall through the underground cave layers and discover
an alien spaceship.
The ship may have been buried underground for thousands of years, but that
doesn't mean it's uninhabited, nor that the creatures still active inside it
are friendly. The fire mission just turned into a survival mission.
Sure...it does resemble the video game DOOM, or Unreal Tournament or my fave;
Quake. But then that's why I'm enjoying the e-book so much.
If you like faced paced Military SF, without the social observations of Robert
Heinlein or the complex descriptions of Richard Morgan, then you'll probably
enjoy Michael E. Marks Dominant Species.
Dominant Species is written in third person, past tense.
It's e-books like this, well written, with good sentence structure, dialogue
and layout that proves once and for all that an indie self published author can
produce a novel that's just as good as anything made by any of the major
publishing companies.
Click here to buy Dominant Species, by Michael E. Marks on Amazon