While this series of books is numbered differently based on where you look, I think if you were to read it in the correct sequence you should follow the path below.
- THE SLAVER WARS: ALIEN CONTACT BY RAYMOND L. WEIL
- MOON WRECK: THE SLAVER WARS (BOOK 2)
- MOON WRECK: FLEET ACADEMY (THE SLAVER WARS 3)
On quite a few lists books 2 & 3 are labeled as the Moon Wreck series, making this one (First Strike) book 2 instead of Book 4 which gets confusing. Stick with my numbering however and the story works better! 🙂
This story starts out with two Hocklyn Slave Empire warships jumping in space very close to the Human Federation of Worlds home systems and finding a human mining colony. A Federation ship discovers them and realizes the Hocklyns are ahead of schedule in finding them. The Hocklyn thought they had exterminated these humans hundreds of years ago. The discovery causes alarm back in the human Federation.Author Raymond L. Weil takes his readers several hundred years into the future with First Strike. In the previous book in the Slaver Wars series, Jeremy Strong and his band of friends find the Hocklyns and launch a new era in human paranoia. Yes, there are other alien races out there, and they want to kill us all. It wasn’t pleasant news. Jeremy and his friends decided to go into cryosleep, joining legendary Admiral Hedon
Author Raymond L. Weil takes his readers several hundred years into the future with First Strike. In the previous book in the Slaver Wars series, Jeremy Strong and his band of friends find the Hocklyns and launch a new era in human paranoia. Yes, there are other alien races out there, and they want to kill us all. It wasn’t pleasant news. Jeremy and his friends decided to go into cryosleep, joining legendary Admiral Hedon Streth. They’ll be awakened when needed. First Strike is that time.
First Strike is somewhat self-explanatory as this time the Humans are taking the war to the Hocklyns. As the cryosleep chambers holding the remaining original survivors start to fail, and the dreaded enemy continue to close in on the Earth, the only option is to actually take the fight to the Hocklyns. Not only will this help give Earth the time it needs to continue building its defenses, it will also allow the fleet an opportunity to see how their new weapons compare against those of the Hocklyn Slave Empire.
While books 2 & 3 were somewhat smaller in scope focusing more on the individual vs. the whole underlying story, this one is almost the exact opposite. It takes us back to space and back to big space battles too! Lots and lots of space battles!! 🙂 Weil ramps up the pace for this book and keeps it high. He doesn’t have any problems killing off his characters. Death and destruction permeate the battles. The humans take the fight to the nasty reptilian Hocklyns, who want to annihilate the entire human race. There’s no negotiating. The admiral shoots first and lets higher powers sort it out. It’s a black and white cautionary tale. And it’s quite entertaining.
The book is of course not just one battle after another. The humans get a few new allies. A mysterious race is briefly introduces which I assume will play some role further on. We get to know some of the Hocklyns more in-depth and some of them are more than likely to continue to play a major role in future books. Then there is the mysterious relation between the AIs and the humans. Why do the AIs seem to fear the humans and how is it that they seem to even know about humans already before the Hocklyns attacked them the first time?
This book can really be said to be the starting point of the real action of the series. The first book was really mostly explaining the background of the entire set of previous and future books, both the Slaver Wars and The Moon Wreck series. As I mentioned before there are plenty of space battles in this book. The humans are indeed giving the both Hocklyns and the AIs the finger big time. That being said, it is just the opening salvo of a long war.