Ben

I like 1950s SF, for the most part. This book was a disappointment.
It's a little uncomfortable with what it's supposed to be. It can't decide whether to be a space adventure perhaps aimed at younger readers or a moral lecture aimed at their parents.
Where it falls down is in its rambling. For the first hundred pages we follow the unlikeable protagonist as he roams the ship and there begins to be a bit of a problem with viewpoint. The character is uncertain about how large the ship is and so is the story - at some points travel between decks is something achieved by dropping through a trapdoor and at others times it takes a day's journey with packs of provisions.
Then, out of nowhere, the semi-realistic setting is shattered when a bunch of intelligent rats stroll into a scene towing a caged, telepathic rabbit they are using to extract information from prisoners. And this has no bearing on any of the rest plot, before or after, but is the first of many more WTF moments.
At one point the characters find an ancient swimming pool and, thinking back to books they've read, they decide that it must be the sea. I'm fine with that. As a reader, I like knowing more than the characters. But why make it one throw-away line? Take these sort of comedy mistakes and use them to pad out the otherwise fairly boring trudge through corridor after corridor. Otherwise they're pointless.
And they've never mentioned reading books like that before. In fact, I'm pretty sure only the priest could read earlier in the book. And later some of these characters are revealed to be from off the ship in the first place, with all of Earth's knowledge available to them.
The inconsistency and wasted opportunity becomes infuriating after a while.

Wikipedia tells me this was Aldiss' first novel. I like some of his other stuff.

I think I like military science fiction. But it's so hard to tell, because a lot of it isn't very good.What I mean here is that The Lost Fleet isn't very good. It's not awful, it's all-round better than [b:Into the Black 12971820 Into the Black (Odyssey One, #1) Evan Currie https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1334235177l/12971820.SY75.jpg 16237035] (by Evan Currie, and which I reviewed before) for example, and yet in individual ways its so much worse.The characters are all the same. The bad apples are cardboard cut-out people with no personality apart from the will to be the villains.It needs an editor to point out the language problems. Phrases with annoying repetition, like “He could see that the ship had once been a good-looking ship, but...” just set my teeth on edge.People glower and scowl a lot, which is apparently the MSF way of showing emotion.The protagonist is constantly exhausted, which has an in-universe explanation, but is really a lazy way of replacing conflict with an inner struggle. In one paragraph, his effective second-in-command goes from “glowering” to “glowing” because he compliments her. It's like people are really primitive state machines or something.The premise is interesting: it's an interstellar case of impostor syndrome. I mean, it's definitely explored, I'm just not sure that repeating thoughts about how he can't live up to people's expectations is a fulfilling exploration.Then there are Big Space Battles and I have a problem with them.I mentioned [b:Into the Black 12971820 Into the Black (Odyssey One, #1) Evan Currie https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1334235177l/12971820.SY75.jpg 16237035] earlier because I see a lot of similarities between the books, but what Currie does well is his presentation of the mechanics of warfare over large distances. Campbell tries to make things trickier by factoring in light-speed delays where one side can't tell what the other is doing for minutes at a time, and that's... reasonable. It's actually pretty smart.It would work if his premise - that both sides have no concept of formations or tactics whatsoever - wasn't so preposterous. It would work if his strategy wasn't “attack from the sides rather than head-on”. It would work, but it doesn't, because everything feels like a muddle stretched over several pages.There are a couple of fairly clumsy hints that we're going to be seeing Mysterious Aliens in the sequels. A bit of conclusion-jumping by an otherwise unseen team of engineers gets revisited near the end with the protagonist musing to himself over whether aliens could be real. Hmm.