"Terra: The New Frontiers Series, Book Seven" by Jack L Knapp

"Terra: The New Frontiers Series, Book Seven" by Jack L Knapp
    https://www.amazon.com/Terra-New-Frontiers-Book-Seven/dp/B09BSWPQ7G/
Book number seven of a eight book science fiction space opera series.  I read the well printed and well bound POD (print on demand) trade paperback self published by the author in 2021.  I have all eight books in the series and am rereading them now with the number seven and eight books that I just bought from Big River.
Wow, great story with lots of character development and action.  An older engineer buys a bunch of Nikola Tesla's journals in an old chest and spots a design for an "electric turbine" that was never built.  He builds a working version of the electric impeller (a device that converts electricity into motion) after many restarts and has an anti-gravity device.  The rest of the story concerns project funding and building various containers for the electric impeller and various peoples trying to steal the design.  And aliens.  Lots of space aliens.
The Mars humans now have Flicker FTL space ships that can totally clone themselves.  The ships and their AI computers are way beyond what the Mars humans and Terran humans can produce.  But, going FTL is dangerous and there is hard radiation that makes it through the ship's hull.  The Flickers get around the radiation by swimming in their nanite pools daily on board the ships.  The Flickers are near immortal due to their nanite pools but are slowly dying out since no males have been born in thousands of years.  Apparently their DNA was severely damaged during a civil war thousands of years ago which radically changed the survivors.
The writing of the story is a little bit rough, a little more editing would have been good.  But for me, the story is always the most important thing.
BTW, this is not the first time that a story has been written similar to this.  Several stories have "magical" engines for space drives.  A very similar book is John Varley's most excellent "Red Thunder" which uses the squeezer drive.
     https://www.amazon.com/Red-Thunder-Lightning-Novel/dp/0441011624/
The reason why I like these stories so much is that it is not just the new drive device, it is also the design and work to build the container around the new device.  And the resulting societal changes from the revolutionary technological changes.
My rating:  5 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating:  4.3 out of 5 stars (51 reviews)
Lynn