I can’t, I just can’t.
I just can’t spend time on books that are clearly sub-par. And boy is this ever one.
So much of its general pretense is simply cribbed from Star Trek its laughable. Oh, you’ve got a Scottish lead engineer who speaks in an appropriately Scottish accent where no one else in the novel has any distinguishable accent though they come from various defined ethnic backgrounds? You’ve got it.
A giant cross galactic “empire” as a controlling government keeping the peace? Sure
Mysterious and unexplained methods of interstellar travel via McGuffin like technology and “points” in space? Got that too.
Positing the events over a 1000 years in the future but with humanity still falling along US/Soviet lines of influence and outcome along with entire planets populated by ethno-factions that align with Earth circa 1975? Got it.
Warships populated by beer drinking and still-creating staff hiding such creations from their superiors? That’s here too!
And that’s even before we get to the nonsensical “aliens” who are capable of speaking English in the first few moments of interaction, are bipedal in nature and have “faces” and other near human features as well as similar gravitational and atmospheric requirements…
Its all just so hackneyed as to be laughable. Maybe the core idea of first contact and the light-sail on which the aliens first arrive are solid foundations for a sci-fi work but the character development (or lack thereof) is a massive failure with the overall prose of the work leaving one to wonder just how far past elementary school the authors had progressed.
Gross in its waste of my time and cut short at 200 of its 500 or so pages never to be picked up again.