Before he turned to writing, Graham Sharp Paul served as a commissioned officer in the British and Australian Navies, and then worked in finance and business consulting until he retired to write in 2003. With his debut novel The Battle at the Moons of Hell, Paul marks his entry to the field of military science fiction. It is the first book in Paul’s “Helfort’s War” series, but still stands alone well as self-contained story.
The Battle at the Moons of Hell focuses on the story of Michael Helfort, newly commissioned Junior Lieutenant in the Federated Worlds Space Fleet. Helfort is assigned to the DLS-387, a small reconnaissance vessel. DLS-387 is traveling on a routine patrol when it receives urgent news: a Federated Worlds ship, the civilian liner Mumtaz, has been hijacked and the advanced terraforming equipment it carried stolen by agents of the Hammer of Kraa, a brutal theocratic regime that has been a frequent enemy of the Federated Worlds. An informant in the Hammer government has revealed that Mumtaz’s passengers and crew have been taken to the world of Hell, a barely-habitable planet where the Hammer puts prisoners, dissidents, and heretics to work in nightmarish labor camps.
DLS-387 is ordered to change course for Hammer space in order to perform a covert reconnaissance flyby that will provide intelligence for a Federated Worlds rescue mission and retaliatory strike. Penetrating so deep into enemy space will be dangerous, and if DLS-387 succeeds, a bloody confrontation with the Hammer will still lie ahead. The Federated Worlds cannot allow hostile powers to abduct and enslave its citizens – and Helfort cannot leave his mother and younger sister, passengers on the Mumtaz, to die hundreds of light-years from home.
The Battle at the Moons of Hell is a promising debut for Paul. The action is exciting and extremely tense. Paul does a nice job of providing a panoramic view of events, moving from Helfort and his crewmates at the front to the imprisoned passengers of the Mumtaz to the highest levels of government on both sides. Paul also largely avoids resorting to the sort of large lumps of exposition that often frustrate readers of military science fiction and space opera.
My primary complaint is that the characterization of Michael Helfort himself is lacking; he is defined enough to make me care about what happens to him, but he still seemed rather flat. Most of the secondary characters suffered a similar problem.
I thought the action scenes were great, on the other hand. Paul’s descriptions of battle do a good job of bringing out the sheer size of space, with ships exchanging salvos that take several minutes to reach their targets, while the crews hold their breath as automated ship defenses duel with vast clouds of rail gun-propelled metal slugs to decide the ship’s fate. Paul exploits this to the hilt, and generates a tremendous sense of tension from it. His details and description are highly effective and give Paul’s description of space combat a visceral, almost physically punishing feel.
The setting is somewhat lightly sketched in, but still interesting. I especially liked his portrayal of the internal politics of the Hammer of Kraa; its ruthless brutality and bloody purges as members of the ruling party struggle for dominance seemed like something out of Stalinist Russia and did a great job of evoking an utterly nightmarish society.
I liked The Battle at the Moons of Hell and would recommend it to fans of military science fiction in the vein of authors like David Weber. Graham Sharp Paul is a promising addition to military science fiction, and I look forward to seeing more from him.
John Markley is a newspaper reporter and freelance writer from Illinois, and has been addicted to science fiction since elementary school. His other interests include history, science, video games, and martial arts. He maintains the blog Vast and Cool and Unsympathetic.
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