The Silver Ships

This is a traditional, old-style, science fiction novel with spaceships and physics. It also has relatively flat characters and a near-perfect central protagonist.

The novel stars Alex Racine, a young Space Hero Guy straight out of Central Casting. He owns an asteroid tug.

(Spoilers follow, but only for the first few chapters.) He finds a derelict spacecraft speeding through his sector of space and captures it using fancy math. He discovers that the spacecraft has been damaged. Some of its crew are still alive, but they're in stasis. It turns out they are humans from another settlement. They were attacked by The Silver Ships.

This feels like the awkward first episode of a new SF TV series. You have to introduce all of the characters and set up the premise for the rest of the series. I get the sense that the later books get a bit more exciting. It was a good read, all things considered. I have no major complaints other than it's nothing I haven't seen before.

If you like this type of SF, maybe give it a try. There's something like 20 books in this series. It's really for those of you who consume a lot of SF and are constantly in need of food for your ravenous maw.

For those of you who like traditional SF but read fewer books, I recommend that you look for standalone books by any of the famous authors.