E-Book review: Dominant Species Michael E Marks

Okay...I finished the three sample chapters and then went straight to the Amazon Kindle store and bought the entire novel download. Amazon delivered it to my PC Kindle about thirty seconds later.
Cost me all of US$1.99

I had to purchase the book for two reasons...the first being I'm enjoying the story and the characters.

The second being that those of you (like Dungeoneer) who used to read my SF stories over at Pulp and Dagger.com may remember I wrote a SF novella called RAT's.
About a small Special Forces fast response unit. A Rapid Action Team. You might also recall that toward the end of the story two of the team members, Jazz and the Iceman, were wearing nanite impregmated armoured battle suits.

Well guess what...the marine unit in Dominant Species is a Rapid Assault Team and they wear nanotube enhanced armoured battle suits.

Quite a coincidence yeah?
I certainly thought so.
But there are more things in heaven and earth, etc, so I'm prepared to accept that it's quite possible two different authors came up with similar ideas.
I wrote RAT's just after I saw the movie, DOOM.
The marines in that were the Rapid Response Tactical Squad. They overlooked a cool unit name there I thought, and right away started to get the idea for my RAT's story.

I digress...
So anyway, apart from the fact that I'm curious to see if the author of Dominant Species has any more similar surprises in store for me I'm quite enjoying both the writing style and the story itself.
Of course there's no massive character development, why would there be? The story is about a small unit of super tough Space Marines on a fire mission to knock out the defences on a Rimmer (Rim World natives) held planet, before an all out attack by a much larger marine strike force.

Two of the main characters knew each other before, back when they played NFL Hyperball, a 3 dimensonal version of American Football. I liked the way that game was described. Sounded interesting. Players compete in an anti-grav enviroment. Would be super cool to play a game that way.

The story line is fairly simple...the RAT's are on a fire misson to a take out some vital equipment on a mining world before the rest of the marines turn up. During the mission they fall through the underground cave layers and discover an alien spaceship.
The ship may have been buried underground for thousands of years, but that doesn't mean it's uninhabited, nor that the creatures still active inside it are friendly. The fire mission just turned into a survival mission.

Sure...it does resemble the video game DOOM, or Unreal Tournament or my fave; Quake. But then that's why I'm enjoying the e-book so much.

If you like faced paced Military SF, without the social observations of Robert Heinlein or the complex descriptions of Richard Morgan, then you'll probably enjoy Michael E Marks Dominant Species.

Dominant Species is written in third person, past tense.

It's e-books like this, well written, with good sentence structure, dialogue and layout that proves once and for all that an indie self published author can produce a novel that's just as good as anything made by any of the major publishing companies.

You can read other reviews or order it here: http://www.amazon.com/Dominant-Speci.../dp/B002SG7OVW

Cheers: Jaq