[Complete] [94K] [Military Sci-fi] Soft Target
I’m looking for a full beta read of my novel (I’ve already had two alpha readers) to provide me with detailed reader reactions, plus of course as much feedback as possible on any weak points that stand out. I have links to five short questionnaires scattered throughout the novel, and would also like a summary of findings after finishing the book.
I’m absolutely willing to critique swap, and suggest we exchange the first 10K-15K words of our works first to ensure that we’re compatible. Blurb, content warnings, and excerpt follow.
How much can one person stand to lose in war?
Conflict rages across the stars. Only Ground Corps prevents human settlers from being overrun by the Cetans at every turn.
In one of these many battles, Lance Corporal Tabor “Tab” Novak fights with such gallantry he is selected into the elite HAMMER powered armor unit. Yet, here he finds he no longer surpasses his peers, but struggles to keep up with Ground Corps’ finest – which spurs him to greater successes.
However, HAMMER demands much from its members: physical, mental, and emotional. Humanity is threatened everywhere, and Tab is first to fight, enduring loss after loss both in and out of combat. In doing so, he risks his health, his relationship with his family, his morals, and the love of his life, all in the pursuit of valor.
How much will he choose to sacrifice on the altar of victory?
Soft Target is the first novel in a series featuring the page-turning action of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War cycle and Marko Kloos’ Frontlines books tempered with the sensibilities of David Drake’s stories and the moral complexity of John Haldeman’s The Forever War.
Content Warnings: Wartime graphic violence, language, consensual adult sexual situations
Brief Excerpt:
The stench: the alien Squibs living in their ramshackle domos, atmo reeking because they need traces of sulfur, their so-called food cooking out in the open, tendrils of prismatic smoke coating noses and lungs, the pungent residue of SSX explosions, the chemical snaps of accelerator bullets, the ozone flashes of rail-assisted rounds, the goddamned murky stagnant water, and the burning, oh God, the burning of who knows what trash and biomatter in the squat little fires spread among whatever dryish ground can be found on this mudhole. Thank Christ my visor lid’s down and intact.
We’re deployed on Erato IV, a mucky, wet, slimy swamp of a planet. Again, I’m stunned: how can there be so many fires on such a wet shitpile? And what sin did the Muse of, I want to venture, erotic poetry commit to earn the punishment of having this hellhole of a joint settlement détente planet named after her? (I can never remember which Muse is which, except Terpsichore: dance and chorus.) Green and brown land and murky water and sumpy mud and mire and marsh stretches as far as the eye can see. That’s until you reach the dingy plascrete blocks ringing the settlements, whether human or Squib, the ramshackle fencing that bounds the pastures (and whatever can graze here, I don’t want to eat), or the few solid roads that usually double as the demarc lines crisscrossing the dreary terrain, sectioning off the settlement zones of the two races.
Intel has gotten word a large weapons cache is hidden within the messy, muddy Squib village in front of us. Now, the weird thing about their settlements? They’re quiet. Sure, they’ve got their flitters and machines and whatever, kids scream and play, but the adults, they’re usually communicating telepathically and/or pheromonically. (And the latter adds yet another delightful top note to the cavalcade of scents.) So, there’s minimal talking, and when you do hear it, it’s in that pulpy blip-dool-poolp language of theirs. You don’t know whether the old farts are gabbing about Squib dominoes or how they are getting ready to duck because the insurgents have a bomb ready to blow your ass to hell.