Gotta say I don't normally do reviews for books, but this book deserves one.

The Bad:

I'll start with what I didn't like about Mr. Okuda's novel.
It has a slow start and doesn't really get into the "meat" of the actual story until Chapter 5 when Sergeant Kabuto Tokugawa and Admiral Tofunai discuss what Doctor Xiang discovered in the alien spacestation around Alpha Centauri.
Then the book takes off, and gets really interesting.

My other complaint is that while very believable, the author doesn't give detailed enough explanations of his machines (like the MBR-01 Main Battle Robot or the AS-01 Assault Shuttle).
Therefore I couldn't give the book a 5 star rating since it was hard for me to visualize the ships and the large battle robots.

I don't mind all the different acronymns for the battle robots and such, but I would have enjoyed more detailed descriptions of them.

The Good:

First and foremost, I bought the ebook version, and found no grammatical mistakes or spelling errors.
For a small publisher to produce a work free of any errors is a big plus with me.
The editor clearly did her job well.

What was done right in this novel is the storyline.
It is superb, complex, and flows very well.
The political scheming and military strategy presented in this work are very realistic, and I recommend this work to anyone who likes "Hard" Science Fiction as opposed to "soft."

The characters were developed quite well over the course of the story. Especially Gideon Krieg. I didn't like him at first, but by the end of the story he's no longer a sniveling push-over and to me that helped quite a bit.
The children in the book (William and Rachael) are also among my favorite characters in this work.
They're not the typical child characters that seem to innundate modern SF these days.

The "science" of this fictional work is very believable. Even with "zombies" in the book, they're NOT your typical George A Romero type silly, mindless, flesh eating, drones hell bent on eating brains.
Okuda's take on the whole zombie thing is actually quite scary in an intellectual way considering the human body is nothing more than a biomechanical mechanism. I'll leave it at that so as not to spoil the fun of that part of the book.

The theme of this work comes through at the very end during the conversation in the pizza shop on Mars in the Epilogue.
I can see how this book defends the idea that humanity needs to transcend its current state and evolve into something new to expand into the galaxy.
Within the framework of this story that idea seems like the only solution for the characters to take, but it isn't done in a polemic way.

The author doesn't attempt to proselytize the reader into any one way of thinking.
He clearly uses history as a reference (the demise of the Soviet Union) to make points about the shortcommings of current political thought, much in the way that Asimov used his psychohistory to criticize what history has taught us about abusive religions.

Overall I thougth this was a great book, just wished there was more detail. ( )

A wild ride into the unexpected.
What starts off as a Heinleinesc military SF adventure, quickly turns into a full blown epic story about the weakness of balkanized human civilization and the implications should we ever encounter another intelligent species.
Particularly one that is hundreds of thousands of years older than we are.
Can't say I liked this book until I got to Chapter 9. After that this novel had me captivated.
Took me awhile to understand where the author was going with all the political talk in the book, and at first it was a turn off, but by the middle of the book it became clear what Mr. Okuda is trying to say.
I gave it a 5 star even though there were a few minor spelling mistakes.
Mistakes are common even in books from the big publishing houses as this often happens with a 1st printing.
I recommend this book to anyone who's interested in a good old fashioned Hard SF yarn. ( )

Not what I expected at all.
This book starts off with what appears to be a political science fiction novel, but quickly changes into a Campbellian Hard SF story about the nature of man and how it must change in order for humanity to evolve into a spacefaring culture.

A slow starter, this book will enlighten, entertain, enthrall, intellectually stimulate, and suck in mature, intellectual readers.
I don't recommend this book to those who are easily offended or those who can't handle opinions which challenge their own beliefs.
This book challenges ALL of the traditional -isms and -ologies in order to show how our society must advance as a whole in order for it to survive.
A truly refreshing SF book that focuses on both the "hard" and "soft" sciences. ( )