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Star Soldier (Book #1 of the Doom Star Series)
 
 

Star Soldier (Book #1 of the Doom Star Series) [Kindle Edition]

Vaughn Heppner
4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (143 customer reviews)

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Product Description

It’s survival of the fittest in a brutal war of extinction!

Created in the gene labs as super soldiers, the Highborn decide to replace the obsolete Homo sapiens. They pirate the Doom Stars and capture the Sun Works Ring around Mercury. Now they rain asteroids, orbital fighters and nine-foot tall drop troops onto Earth in a relentless tide of conquest.

Marten Kluge is on the receiving end. Hounded by Thought Police, he lives like an ant in a kilometer-deep city. The invasion frees him from a re-education camp but lands him in the military, fighting for the wrong side.

STAR SOLDIER is the story of techno hell in a merciless war, with too many surprises for any grunt’s sanity. STAR SOLDIER is a full novel, 82,000 words in length by Vaughn Heppner, Writers of the Future winner, Vol. IX.


Excerpt © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

7 AUGUST 2346 A.D.

Father and son floated swiftly, silently, with purpose, through a seldom-used maintenance shaft. They refused to sell their souls to Social Unity. Three years of hiding like rats proved that and culminated tonight. They had just placed thirty-six bombs onto the space habitat’s outer skin and had eleven minutes to go.

Father and son looked nothing alike. Marten Kluge was nineteen, lean and had a blond-haired, handsome face like his mother. He cradled a stubby tangler against his vacc suit and had a high-tech kit on his belt. The old man, Ben Kluge, was massive and hard-eyed, with a needler attached to his silver suit. In the last half hour, he’d killed four men, two with his hands. No one had heard or missed the men so far. The Sun Works Factory circling Mercury was vast beyond any space habitat in the Solar System. The corpses were left to float in dark shafts. Father and son now donned helmets, activated oxygen tanks and opened a hatch for the next phase of the operation.

Product Details

  • Format: Kindle Edition
  • File Size: 855 KB
  • Sold by: Amazon Digital Services
  • Language: English
  • ASIN: B003SNJVH4
  • Text-to-Speech: Enabled
  • Lending: Enabled
  • Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (143 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,190 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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Customer Reviews

143 Reviews
5 star:
 (72)
4 star:
 (42)
3 star:
 (14)
2 star:
 (6)
1 star:
 (9)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
4.1 out of 5 stars (143 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

83 of 93 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars REAL SF, and well edited, July 2, 2010
By 
A Customer (Boca Raton, FL) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Star Soldier (Book #1 of the Doom Star Series) (Kindle Edition)
Hard SF is hard to find these days. This is the real deal. We learn how much more radiation one is exposed to on one side of Mercury's orbit vs. the other in the first few pages, for example. But it isn't all technobabble, the characters are very human and having a very hard time of it.

What's even more unusual about this book is it's military Hard SF, even more rare. We are taken into a grim, not-so-distant future where Earth is in the hands of a single political party and those who complain are harshly abused. Much of the book concerns a civil war/rebellion and different groups of genetically-built supermen and who shall rule over all.

Plenty of cool tech ideas, plenty of combat, and what sold me right off was finding only a single slight error in the entire sample (see if you can find it). Some of these cheap books are not of pro quality, but this one did it right, as if the author truly cared.
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56 of 68 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Star Soldier, October 5, 2010
By 
G. Nolf (Rehoboth Beach, DE USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Star Soldier (Book #1 of the Doom Star Series) (Kindle Edition)
I found this book difficult to rate. It has its good points and its bad. Ultimately, I felt like this was an enjoyable sci-fi failure.

First of all, the editing of this book is absolutely ATROCIOUS. I do not remember ever reading any published work with so many errors, many of them painfully obvious. This was very noticeable throughout the entire book, and sometimes I had to re-read passages several times in order to get the intended meaning. Normally, a work this poorly written would be tossed aside by me, but I found myself enjoying the story and the world enough to power through this annoyance (and from the view of an avid reader, insult).

The world and story are the redeeming qualities of this book. An interesting and "realistic" view of future incarnation of humanity. If you're looking for a "Star Trek"-like utopian view, keep looking. This world is dark and rife with dangers and injustices. The story is interesting, although not always well written. It follows a few main characters and their companions, but not always with the effectiveness that is needed to convey a clear storyline.

The characters in this story are one of its weakest points. They never really come to life, nor does the reader ever grow to care one way or another about them. The lines drawn between protagonists and antagonists are unrealistically defined and obvious. Their thoughts and feelings are sterile and as you read, you never feel anything any character is feeling, you are simply being told what is going through their mind and heart.

Despite the drawbacks of this book, I enjoyed it thoroughly until the end. The world seemed alive, which was the most redeeming quality about this book. An interesting dynamic of this book is how it pits an extreme socialist/communist society against an extreme caste/monarchy-like one.

This interesting dynamic is however what turns into this books hardest downfall. At the end of this book, the main character has a revelation that ruined my enjoyment of this book. A revelation about freedom and a free nation that once existed. It turned a decent go at a sci-fi epic into preachy, pro-democratic/American propaganda. It would be one thing if this turn in the story fit the story itself, but it doesn't. It kind of comes out of nowhere, and never has a place to settle into the story. It made the book itself drop in value. This is the exact kind of thing that readers of science fiction are trying to escape by reading it. It really killed the book for me, and in one page I went from not being able to wait to read the second book to barely being able to finish the first.

All in all, this was an enjoyable sci-fi failure. This book should have been worked on for a few more years however, both the story and the editing needs a lot of work. And it would have been nice that even if the author's sole intent was to extol the greatness of America & Democracy and vilify other forms of government, that it was integrated into the story more so you didn't feel preached at. In the end, it just comes off as a pathetic attempt to persuade you to the author's ideals.

I should say I don't personally disagree with those ideals, just that they ruined what SHOULD have been a decent novel.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars What could have been, January 3, 2011
By 
Joan M. Giblock (Knoxville, TN United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Star Soldier (Book #1 of the Doom Star Series) (Kindle Edition)
Well, this is a difficult review to write. Not only because I'm typing from the kindle, but also due to the fact that this novel is rich with excellent ideas yet very poorly executed. The author in question appears to be pumping out books fairly often, and I would advise him to take a step back to proofread and further analyze his writings. Now, I'm a pretty big fan of scifi and if you enjoy scifi then go ahead and purchase the entire series. I say this because while this one is riddled with obvious and fairly embarassing typos, it gets much better with the next two books. That's not to say this one isn't an enjoyable right because is. However, when I purchase a novel I expect minimal, hidden typos at most. Some typos in here seriously hinder the reading experience and make me wonder if he typed it all on a kindle. If you can live with some fairly blatant typos then buy it, it's an enjoyable book and only $1
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More About the Author

I was born in Canada and remember as a small boy crawling in my snow-fort. I closed my eyes, and when I tried to open them, they were frozen shut. I didn't panic, but wiped away the ice crystals, unglued my eyes and kept on building my tunnel. Those were great days! I moved to Central California before seventh grade and couldn't believe I lived in a land where oranges grew on trees and you could pick grapes from the vine.

I used to wonder what I wanted to do with my life, what kind of work specifically. I was miserable not knowing and bordering on desperate. Then one day a friend gave me his typewriter. I began working on a novel. A different person told me it was much easier on a computer, so I bought one and began getting up at 4:30 A.M. each morning before work, writing for three hours. My eyes were unglued once again as the pang of misery left my gut. I knew exactly what I wanted to do: write. So now that's what I do, I write, and write, and write, and I love it.


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