Poor Man's Fight by Elliott Kay (4 stars)

I think I came to this book series by seeing some sort of viral tweet by Elliott Kay followed by one of those "this blew up....I also write books" replies that always accompany any highly visible tweet. I bought it because the review rating on amazon is very very high. I wasn't disappointed. 

It's basically die-hard in space, with space pirates :)

A pretty good chunk of the start of this book is a military training montage, which is fairly standard SF fare, but this one is definitely above average. I particularly liked the intense focus on realistic living conditions (i.e cooped up inside for months with no respite) and battle scenarios run by real veterans. This is much more about staying fighting to stay alive in the environment, understanding how to react to decompression, fix air filtration systems etc. than just fighting bad guys.

The big battle scene is of the Matthew Riley level, but with less dumb tropes and more die hard grit.

The pirates are also not one-dimensional "baddies", although I'm a little fuzzy on where this book ends and the next begins. We get to understand their motivations and empathize to some extent, despite their horrendous actions.

Running through all the novels is the message that piling up young people with student debt, and gatekeeping any high-paying jobs on qualifications that require that debt, is being used as a tool to push smart but poor students into the military. In Tanner's world the bureaucracy has also been weaponized to create crippling debt for those who can't buy their way to high test scores.

“You can mug a man or pick his pocket and anyone would call you a thief, but there are a million ways to cheat a man on paper and just call it a clerical error.”

And she said that virtually all wars are just the young and poor like me dying for the lies of old rich people. And she’s right.”

4 stars.