For those who love their sci-fi as hard as a rock, Dilation: A 10,000 Year Sci-Fi Epic delivers. Like The Forever War (by Joe Haldeman), Dilation is focused on the concept of time dilation in space travel. Aliens arrive on Earth, but due to an unfortunate accident, humanity kills them. As such, these aliens have marked us for eradication. To prevent this, Earth sends out soldiers and tacticians into space at relativistic speeds, in order to amass a force to fight off the alien threat. Dilation leans hard into realism. Scientific concepts are a focus of the story, and the accuracy was impressive. In fact, there’s quite the biography at the end listing off the sources the author used. If you’re someone who likes their sci-fi rooted in plausible concepts and scenarios, this is definitely the book for you. It’s clear the author has considered many aspects of future human life, not just weapons or military aspects. The world of the year 12,000 was compelling and fascinating. Yet, because there is so much realism, the characters fall a little flat. While they do have motives that made sense, there wasn’t space in this novel for any of them to get a lot of backstory or to develop highly complex personalities. Oftentimes their emotions towards a situation or another person are told in a very passive way rather than crafting the scene via dialogue or description of facial expressions and body language. That being said, I did love the diversity and my favourite character was Shino. Similarly, the action scenes, while few and far between, were exciting, though I found more active phrases would have made them a bit tighter. While the novel has a touch of military sci-fi, don’t go into it expecting David Drake. I’m more of a space opera fan myself, but if you are a reader who enjoys your science fiction rooted more in science than fiction, you will likely love Dilation.