Daniel, Tony. Guardian of Night. Baen, 2012.
Tony Daniel, who should not be confused with comic book writer Tony S. Daniel, has written a few Star Trek novels, but he may be best at military space opera. In Guardian of Night, humanity is recovering from a devastating attack by a militaristic race humans call sceeve. The attack has unified humanity but has worsened a rift in Guardian culture. Losing the first battle has given humanity a technological spurt. Meanwhile, the Guardians are massing an armada for a second assault, when one of our patrol ships picks up an encrypted message from a sceeve defector. There is plenty of character drama on both sides, but frankly, the sceeve are more interesting than the people, but our AIs are more fun than theirs.
The sceeve characters have all the emotional and political conflicts that we usually associate with human characters. Daniel is efficient in conveying the otherness of the sceeve. Consider this throwaway line: “Malako touched a hand to his lower muzzle, stroked a membrane, considering.” No further description is needed to tell us how nonhuman this sceeve is.
Daniel also discusses the physics of star drives in plausible ways. As he told one reviewer, he wanted to write a tech thriller with explosions. Human AIs are fully conscious and at least one serves as the executive officer on a starship. She usually displays a holographic avatar that looks female and human. She has meaningful conversations with the ship’s captain and plays an important role in the plot but never fully crosses the uncanny valley. 4 stars. ( )

Pretty good military space opera. Lots of space ships which is good. Some dense science extrapolation which I didn't bother to really wrap my head around since I know my brain doesn't work that way or I would have become a theoretical physicist like Sheldon Cooper. Still the space ship designs were way cool. Kind of like Wonder Woman's airplane.

The aliens were very well done physically and I loved how they communicated with smells. That was a fun concept to read about. Like a lot of military sci fi there were quite a few characters which worked pretty well for the plot. Characterization wasn't too in depth. Still the author made an effort to make the characters different and distinctive. The ship captain who was a thrill seeker was a very cool character. Everything in space was an amusement park ride to him. And I'd think that that sort of person would be a good fit for going to space. I also liked Japp who was in the opening sequence and then just a bit farther in the book. Somehow you just got her with a few light touches. The alien was pretty nice too. Although their thinking didn't seem too foreign, there was enough oddities built into their culture to make their thinking reasonably alien.

All in all, a pretty solid military space opera for us lovers of that sort of thing. ( )