Well, the first thing I noticed was that it's verbose. And (alluding to the most common admonition to beginning writers of fiction) that it "tells" things it should be "showing."
And it wastes far too much verbage on things the typical reader would already know. Consider: The Harry Potter franchise is only 16 years old, comprising seven novels, all of which have been made into movies, and perhaps a few reference works, and yet even though I've quite literally never read a HP book, nor seen more than maybe a few short clips of any of the HP movies, I'm hip to the basic characters and concepts. Star Wars has been around for less than 40 years, and yet that, too, is part of worldwide popular culture. I've never seen a single episode (or even a clip of an episode of Doctor Who, and yet I know that The Doctor is a "Time Lord," a powerful alien being who periodically "regenerates" into a new body (an ingenious way of giving the actors playing him an opportunity to retire without major distruptions to the series continuity).
Star Trek has been around for close to five decades, almost as long as Doctor Who (and arguably in much wider distribution), and is at least as deeply embedded in worldwide popular culture, to the point where you would almost have to be living in a pre-steam culture not to at least know who Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, Sulu, and Chekov are.
The first chapter or two of this opus reads rather like Mission to Horatius. Like a children's novel. And yet, I grew up on a series of children's novels (the very first such series, started by the man who invented book-packaging, Edward Stratemeyer), The Bobbsey Twins, and very few Bobbsey Twins novels (I've read virtually all of them, including both original and revised editions, up to the end of the original series) go into as much detail re-introducing continuing characters as was done in Horatius, or in the present opus. And likewise, I found a few "clinkers" (with regard to science, technology, and crew areas of responsibility) that threw me out of the story. (The Stratemeyer Syndicate, by contrast, spared no expense on research, with the result that you can quite literally find your way around Colonial Williamsburg just by reading The Bobbsey Twins' Red, White and Blue Mystery.")
That said, I find that it gets better And that, ironically, Mr. Daniel expends less verbage (and yet does a better job) introducing characters we've never seen before, than re-introducing characters who are part of the pop culture.
