Lieutenant Wyatt Wills is a part of RESIT – the Remote Environment Search and Interdiction Teams. A spaceborne commando force, RESIT deal with everything from rescue missions to space terrorists. Wills’ latest mission is a reconnaissance of a planet Juliet, a home to twenty million people who suddenly stopped all the traffic and communication with other worlds. Accompanied by Sergeant Laramie McCoy, a Juliet native, Wills and his team land to find the planet in chaos: there’s an epidemic of zombie-like infection that the government tries to contain using draconian measures. Immediately, team’s mission changes from intelligence gathering to survival.
ESCAPE VELOCITY is a military sci-fi novel, with an emphasis on “military”. The year is 2272 and humanity have reached the stars. Despite that, there are still United States Marines and they use technology not much different from our own. Isaacs’ soldiers may fly around in spaceships and shoot lasers but judging by the many action scenes in the novel, they could easily hail from our own time. Investigating Juliet presents an intriguing mystery leading into a terrifying moral quandary of a civilization dealing with the spread of a mind-altering disease. Too bad that ESCAPE VELOCITY makes only a token effort of addressing these issues. Instead, Isaacs focuses on fast and furious action as well as on military hardware that, admittedly, is pretty cool, especially if you take a peek at a RESIT tech manual created by the same author.
There’s not much nuance or characterization, although Isaacs does try. Lieutenant Wills is a man scarred by the failure of his last mission. Trying to atone, he is beset by personal doubts and dark memories. Sergeant Laramie is tough and sarcastic but she is shaken by the horrors taking place in her home world. And then there’s Chris Thompson, an angry leader of an insurgency against the government of Juliet. While all three are military professionals, their training goes only so far when dealing with a human cost of a planetary crisis.
As the first novel in the projected series (called The Quantum War), ESCAPE VELOCITY is only a beginning of a larger story. Despite its cliffhanger ending though, most of it is pretty much self-contained. While in no way a future classic, ESCAPE VELOCITY by Jonathan Paul Isaacs is a quick read that just might turn out to be a start of a fun new military sci-fi series.
~Danijel Striga for IndieReader