The Cruel Stars is a military science fiction novel written by John Birmingham. If it has a plot it is folded into the substrate between lots of 'pew pew,' explosions and stereotypic hard bitten tough soldier-y talk. By the end of the novel readers may have lost track of the battling interstellar empires and characters. This is not where Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy meets Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers.
