Twenty-one!!

As of this morning, there are twenty-one reviews of To Honor You Call Us on Amazon.com.  All of the reviews are favorable and the overwhelming majority of them are five stars out of five.  Even the "worst" review, a three star, has a number of very, very nice things to say.  I'm sure that it is these reviews that are selling the book now--as sales continue to be very good all things considered (unknown author, first novel of a series, written in a genre that demands a lot of its readers).  We could not be more pleased.

We know that there is lots of good work out there that never gets noticed and never gets recognized.  We are very thankful that readers have noticed this novel and chosen to express their approval where other people can see it.  We wish we could thank all twenty-one reviewers personally, because we are truly grateful.

One reviewer even compared the book to the works of Heinlein and Doc Smith.  As this was the stuff on which I cut my teeth as a science fiction reader (the first SF novel I ever read was Heinlein's Between Planets) and as one of the things we wanted from the start for these books to do was to evoke the sense of excitement and adventure that those books called forth, this is high praise indeed.  We are very grateful to all those readers who took the time to write reviews, not just because they sell books (and, make no mistake, they do absolutely sell books!) but also because they let us know that we might be on the right track with these books.

We wanted to strike out in a direction that was new, but that had its roots in the adventure literature of the past.  We loved where those old Heinlein and Doc Smith book took us.  We also loved where those Aubry/Maturin and Horatio Hornblower books took us.  We concluded, on careful examination, that those places really weren't that far apart.  Also, we liked the grittiness of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica series and Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, and enjoyed the techno whiz bang of Clancy's The Hunt for Red October and Red Storm Rising, not to mention Patrick Robinson's Nimitz Class and its sequels.  We thought that these were the ingredients of the perfect Military Science Fiction/Space Opera novel or series of novels, and started looking for something like that to read.  We didn't find what we wanted.  Maybe, we thought, these books had yet to be written.  We began to entertain the radical notion that we were just the guys to write them.