Topic: This week I have mostly been reading...
Antares Dawn:
http://3mpub.com/mccollum/sfaz-04e.htm
"When the supergiant star Antares exploded in 2512, the human colony on Alta found their pathway to the stars gone, isolating them from the rest of human space for more than a century. Then one day, a powerful warship materialized in the system without warning. Alarmed by the sudden appearance of such behemoth, the commanders of the Altan Space Navy dispatched one of their most powerful ships to investigate. What ASNS Discovery finds when they finally catch the intruder is a battered hulk manned by a dead crew.
That is disturbing news for the Altans. For the dead battleship could easily have defeated the whole of the Altan navy. If it could find Alta, then so could whoever it was that beat it. Something would have to be done."
Mine is from the 1986 print so it has the awesome Chris Foss cover, although the cover shown on 3m's site gives a more accurate representation of the ships ivolved.
Awesome Chris Foss cover: http://bp3.blogger.com/_XsVALQtGIZM/SGVAbCt8oMI/AAAAAAAAFkU/fQFUqT6UovQ/s1600-h/DSP-055.jpg
The main thing I like about this book is the realism. The ships can't fly around willy-nilly like in Star Wars or Star Trek because of fuel and (natural) speed limits, any journey to any where inl space takes days if not weeks (the average mission length seems to be around six months), and the way they travel interstellar is pure genius.
Oh, and space battles come in two flavours: Drive-By (you can't just spin around and give chase) and a gruelling kind of sci-fi meets 300 running battle that invariably lasts days at a time.