I mean, I can understand that Hemry, as a proud veteran, would want to write a positive portrayal of the service, but it’s stretching plausibility that hardly any of these sailors so much as swear! The language is totally PG-rated throughout. Hemry absorbs you into Sinclair’s environment, and his depiction of the life of a young greenhorn sailor (that’s what the Navy still calls them, even on spaceships) is compellingly realized, if sometimes humorously idealized. This is fairly boilerplate military fiction stuff, but it’s still enjoyable in Hemry’s hands. He has had exactly one course in the subject at the academy.Īround the first hundred pages depict Sinclair’s getting used to shipboard life, making friends among his fellow junior officers, learning which of his hardass superiors are fair and which aren’t, that sort of thing.
One of the many duties with which Sinclair is overwhelmed is that of ship’s legal officer. Our protagonist is Ensign Paul Sinclair, USN, who, as the year 2098 is winding to a close, gets assigned to his first tour of duty aboard the USS Michaelson. This modest release is one of the more worthwhile and provocative novels to come my way in 2003. John Hemry, a writer who draws upon his own naval experience for verisimilitude in his storytelling, gives SF its own JAG with this intelligent and engrossing legal drama. A Just Determination is a welcome deviation from that comic-book norm. Military SF is sometimes an Aliens-inspired, post-adolescent affair associated with jarhead machismo and cigar-chomping sergeants yelling “Go go go!” while their gutsy youngbloods run around fragging everything in sight for God and Country. Share book reviews and ratings with Thomas, and even join a book club on Goodreads.
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