Steel on Target

The Buzzer War, Book 1

By: Kevin Ikenberry

Narrated by: Graham Rowat

An elite soldier. A new armored weapon. The invading aliens have finally met their match.

First Lieutenant Mike Sandhurst led an elite infantry platoon on a rescue mission to Tycho-3. Wearing state-of-the-art ATLAS powered armor, Sandhurst's unit faced down a relentless, wasp-like enemy who tore through them and left Sandhurst for dead.

Rescued by ground forces, Sandhurst gets reassigned as humanity races to war against aliens they call Buzzers.

To fight the Buzzers, humanity turns to the modernized Centurion main battle-tank. Sandhurst must quickly learn the lexicon of "shoot, move, communicate" and lead his fast, self-sustained, and very lethal armored forces.

When the Buzzers appear again to threaten colonized worlds, Sandhurst's regiment moves forward to hold the planet Heske by force. But they aren't alone. The orbital carrier Yorktown and its space-capable wing dominate the skies while tanks take the fight and put Steel on Target.

©2024 Kevin Ikenberry (P)2024 Tantor Media

Excellent MilSF

4.5 stars

After watching an interview with the author on the Military Science Fiction Podcast, I decided to give this series a try.

Good choice.

The plot is very strong: aliens with poorly understood powers/abilities show up out of the dark, kicking off a war with existential stakes.

The best parts of the story are the military elements. Ikenberry is a career military officer, and he writes the details convincingly and the political elements very well. The command structure shows the effects of the "peace dividend" in a believably painful way, but only some of the higher commanders are terrible; this isn't a book intended to attack the concept or structure of a military.

This wasn't a perfect book: the characters are a bit thinner than I might prefer and the main characters' arcs are a bit too similar for my tastes.

Overall, though, if you're at all a fan of the MilSF genre, this should be a priority read.

Way to many POV's makes it confusing

I really love sci-fi military books especially about tanks however this books have way to many pov's you have 10-30 seconds with one pov and then it jumps to another and then what should only take a 15-30 minutes of the audiobook spans over several chapters, but you're still no closer to understanding the story or the MC's since there is so F*****G many pov's and it's all just confusing

Unfortunately it's rare to find a good Military Sci-fi book these days where there is less than 5-10 POV's and in my opinion the more Pov's the worse the story gets. and the slower it is to progress since you have to listen to the same thing over and over again just from a different perspective. So if you feel like me, skip this one and spend your credit on something else.