Lash-Up Mass Market Paperback – May 3, 2016

This book is absolutely amazing. It is riveting at every stage. From the beginning of the spacecraft's creation to the final battle of the book, every page makes you want to keep reading. The very deep technical detail in this book makes you feel very immersed in the story. Every little detail from the composition of its fuel cells to the exact amount of fuel used in the vessel's weapons, to the exact banter used by the military personnel is incredibly accurate.

In a nutshell: Oh, come on now. I'm willing to suspend a lot disbelief for the sake of good storytelling, but this story was just ridiculous!Normally I'm not willing to put in the effort to type up a negative review for a novel I didn't like. I'd just give it one star or so and move on with my life.But this book was written by Larry Bond, a professional and accomplished writer, and it shows. So here I am faced with the somewhat rare situation of a horrible premise that was very well executed. That and it's a Sunday afternoon. I'm bored and a little wired on caffeine, so why the Hell not?***I remember the late 1990s and being on the Lockheed VentureStar email list, and following with growing excitement as updates were regularly sent to me about the building and preparing the 1/3 scale X-33 for flight. Then the bottom of the whole project fell out when testing showed the materials used in the fuel tank was not up to handling cryogenic liquid hydrogen. As the spacecraft was made up of about 90% fuel tank, this was a pretty serious problem. The engineers were bummed. I was bummed. Space fans like me across the world were bummed. Somehow life went on.Well, imagine a world where... I don't know.... I guess the X-33 proof of concept flew successfully and the prototype VentureStar was built and made all ready to go, only to be mothballed for some obscure reason other than technical.This much is believable; Hell, NASA administrators, presidents, and Congress have yanked support for already bought, paid for, and assembled space hardware on more than one occasion in the past. Yes, it's amazingly stupid but it has happened several times, including later Apollo moon missions, the X-38, and a depressing number of planetary probes.The story goes off the rails from there.China decided to be jerks and started shooting down our GPS satellites! And they were gearing up to invade Vietnam! America's hegemony in the Pacific is about to be lost! Oh Noes!Without GPS, our precision weapons were not precision enough to fight the Chinese on Vietnam's behalf, or to take out the hardened and well protected supergun the Chinese were using to launch their attacks.Modifying the weapon systems to use the Russian, European,Chinese or even all three of the alternative satnav systems was ruled out as unworkable in a paragraph of vague hand waving.A plucky aerospace engineer decided this was not acceptable. He had a series of get-togethers with his buddy engineers, a hot lady that eventually became his girlfriend, and perhaps several million gallons of coffee to design a space plane from scratch. Complete with energy weapons. All in a few weeks.The design was widely distributed among technical people and decision makers. Eventually a higher up called our hero to a meeting in the Pentagon and told him to stop sniffing glue and get back to work, which was just about the most realistic part of the book.But The Situation grew increasingly desperate. Then the plans for the armed spaceplane leaked to the wider internet.The president, his back against the wall, called Our Hero into the Oval Office and told him to Get Er Done! He had a blank check when it came to funding, personnel, and any other resources such as existing hardware.But he MUST launch and fight his craft in a mere 70 days.Around this point the book introduced the mothballed VentureStar and seemed to indicate the plan was to adapt the thing for use all along, though this wasn't mentioned earlier. That bit was surprisingly clumsy of the author.Meanwhile, the Army, Navy, and Air Force were quietly dividing their time between arguing against the project and fighting tooth and nail to bring the project under their defense branch.Can Our Hero the engineer recruit, hire, bring together, organize, and house and feed, the team of thousands of highly talented people needed to complete the design, build the hardware, bring the hardware together, integrate the hardware, and launch in 70 days? All while winning over the affection of the hot chick who is probably waaaaay out of his league?Read the book to find out.Or not.At this point I've put in FAR more effort in this review than I probably should have.What the Hell were you thinking, Larry Bond?

I love Larry Bond. Some of his earlier stuff is just my favorite military fiction, period. In the past, lots of military hardware details, good action, decent characters. Characters are not Bond's strong suite, but they are solid. This one was lighter on the military hardware part. Some of that is to be expected given the subject, but it seemed he could have beefed that up. I've not read any of his serial books - I simply HATE serials. I've read some, but only when they were of specified length from the beginning. The Hobbit/Rings series, for example. But I don't want to go too far off topic.Bond reduced the hardware specific parts (maybe other readers found that tedious or boring, I didn't), increased the human factor and ended it up the same - the good guys win. This time, the bad guys weren't really given much of a go once the good guys were on the board, though. This is true - that the good guys always trounce the bad guys - in all his books. So no new stuff there. That's fine - who wants the Chinese to win in a worldwide fight anyway? (except perhaps the Chinese) I'm cool with that, but it would have been a bit more realistic to have some modifiers (I'm not going to be specific here since I'm trying to avoid spoilers) that would provide some give and take and add some drama to the battles.Still, I'll read anything he puts out - serials excepted - that keeps to his roots. This did, more or less, and I enjoyed it. Really, isn't that what fiction is all about anyway? Enjoyment? Good, fast read.

I had really wanted to *love* this book, because the concept is great. An Chinese ASAT that blows up primarily GPS satellites shot from a mountain gun, and the US racing to deal with the new threat with a novel, high-speed no holds program to counter it. The US tries to convert a mothballed spaceship that had never flown - the VentureStar - into a flying space fighter / bomber. I had never heard of the VentureStar, so I learned a bit about it here. So the premise is not bad, but the story? Well.... it needed revision.First, I wondered why ballistic missile with conventional warheads wouldn't be used. Since bombs dropped from space were used, I don't see why conventional ICBMs are any worse. in principle conventional ICBMs could be deployed a lot quicker. Why not just have tried them and have them intercepted?But the real problem with this book is its overall plotting and focus. The "space battle" is the last two chapters, with most of the book not even being about the development of the spaceship, but about the interagency disputes. Talk about dull. There were a few battlescenes at sea and in the air - but these were absolutely irrelevant to the storyline and the spaceship. Just tossed in their for some random action.If I were to rewrite this, I would have skipped 90% of the interagency arguments, sped up the development, skipped the random sea and land battles, and focused on the space battle. It's a great idea. Why not have a few missions? They get progressively harder, they have problems with equipment, maybe some of the crew die? Maybe have a space shuttle or two sent up first?For a book about war in space, there is just not very much war in space.Liam Dooleywww.liamhdooley.com

Well Larry Bond writes a good story,great plot and steady action are part of this book. I have never been dissappointed by Mr. Bond and I recommend this book too all his fans.

Although I love anything from Larry Bond, I found this novel somewhat simple compared to any other of this authors works. Still, I enjoyed the story but was hoping for more. I look forward to further works from Larry Bond.

Lots of fun twists and turns with technology that is plausible enough to make it seem real. Hope there is another to the series!

Larry is high on my list of great writers. He ranks with Clancy, Brad Thor, and Ludlum.

Excellent Book. Larry Bond is a great story weaver.