space opera Archives

Yzabel / August 7, 2018

Review: Stars Uncharted

My rating: [rating=3]

Blurb:

Three people who are not who they claim to be:

Nika Rik Terri, body modder extraordinaire, has devoted her life to redesigning people’s bodies right down to the molecular level. Give her a living body and a genemod machine, and she will turn out a work of art.

Josune Arriola is crew on the famous explorer ship the Hassim, whose memory banks contain records of unexplored worlds worth a fortune. But Josune and the rest of the crew are united in their single-minded pursuit of the most famous lost planet of all.

Hammond Roystan, the captain of the rival explorer ship, The Road, has many secrets. Some believe one of them is the key to finding the lost world.

Josune’s captain sends her to infiltrate Roystan’s ship, promising to follow. But when the Hassim exits nullspace close to Roystan’s ship, it’s out of control, the crew are dead, and unknown Company operatives are trying to take over. Narrowly escaping and wounded, Roystan and Josune come to Nika for treatment–and with problems of her own, she flees with them after the next Company attack.

Now they’re in a race to find the lost world…and stay alive long enough to claim the biggest prize in the galaxy.

Review:

[I received a copy of this book through Penguin’s “First To Read” program, in exchange for an honest review.]

I have a soft spot for sci-fi stories with rag-tag crews and old spaceships; unsurprisingly, this is the kind of story that will get my attention.

The story revolves around two main female characters: Nika, a body modder on the run from her abusive-slash-mafioso boyfriend, and Josune, undercover engineer on board a ship known as “The Road” (these aren’t spoilers: you learn about it in the very first chapters). As they both have to face their own brand of trouble, their paths converge towards The Road, always underlined by the shadow of a man named Goberling, who almost a century ago came back from an expedition with precious metals… but never revealed where he had found them.

This is space opera through and through, with a dash of transhumanism. It’s a world where humanity obviously colonised many worlds, and where people regularly reinvent themselves through body modding—which offers pleznty of possibilities, too, considering how many characters in the book aren’t who they claim to be. It’s also a world of commercial ships, of big corporations that no one dares to cross, and of exploration and legends: The Road’s full name is “The Road to the Goberlings”, and another ship, the Hassim, is renowned through the whole galaxy as an exploration ship whose crew has dedicated itself to finding Goberling’s lost world.

In general, I quite liked the characters, and the relationships developing between them. They’re all their own kind of badass, even the ones, like Nika, who’re not crew that learnt to fight on a ship. There’s a slight dash of hinted romance, but never enough to interfere with the story. The budding friendship between Nika and Josune never veers towards that annoying trope of “female friendships always tinged with interest for A Man”. The Road’s crew sticks together, bound with a loyalty that keeps growing with each trip. And the regular quibbles between Nika and Snow (another modder), was overall fun enough, also because you can feel the nascent respect underneath.

Other things I liked less, though. First, the pacing was sometimes weird, carried in places by short sentences and paragraphs that felt too abrupt; the characters are constantly on the run, and at times it felt that not much happened, that everything was mainly their running away, with bits of story in between.

Another problematic aspect was Nika’s obsession with modding. I enjoyed the more technical side of it (I wish we had such machines, hah!), but she too often went about imagining how she’d reinvent the people around her, from their hair to judging them too fat, which was definitely obnoxious (and motivated much more by aesthetic judgements than by health reasons). For a character who prides herself on being a trend-setter, her trends were somewhat quite… conservative, a.k.a. everybody has to be slim and trim. Somehow, I’m not convinced that if our future does hold such body modding in store, everyone will want the same.

Finally, I wasn’t fully on board (look what I did there) with some of the plot twists, because they were too easy to guess, and I could see them coming a parsec away, to the point that I couldn’t understand how the characters didn’t see it sooner. Maybe it’s just me, or maybe it was made too obvious, too soon? I don’t know. And we don’t get to learn that much about Snow, which is a shame, because I suspect he also has his closet full.

Conclusion: 3 to 3.5 stars. In the end, some parts I had trouble with, others kept me hooked, so while it wasn’t the best book I read this year, it was nonetheless very entertaining, and set in a world that I wouldn’t mind revisiting, because a single book can’t possibly reveal all there is to know about it.

Yzabel / November 4, 2016

Review: Revenger

Revenger by Alastair Reynolds

My rating: [rating=3]

Blurb:

The galaxy has seen great empires rise and fall. Planets have shattered and been remade. Amongst the ruins of alien civilizations, building our own from the rubble, humanity still thrives.
And there are vast fortunes to be mad, if you know where to find them…
Captain Rackamore and his crew do. It’s their business to find the tiny, enigmatic worlds which have been hidden away, booby-trapped, surrounded by layers of protection – and to crack them open for the ancient relics and barely-remembered technologies inside. But while they ply their risky trade with integrity, not everyone is so scrupulous.
Adrana and Fura Ness are the newest members of Rackamore’s crew, signed on to save their family from bankruptcy. Only Rackamore has enemies, and there might be more waiting for them in space than adventure and fortune: the fabled and feared Bosa Sennen in particular.
Revenger is a science fiction adventure story set in the rubble of our solar system in the dark, distant future – a tale of space pirates, buried treasure, and phantom weapons, of unspeakable hazards and single-minded heroism… and of vengeance…

Review:

[I received a copy of this novel through NetGalley.]

I’ve never read anything by this author before, so I can’t compare with his other works. In general, although “Revenger” is not without faults, it was an entertaining novel.

“Revenger” takes place in a decrepit, dark solar system. In this world where spaceships run both on ion engines and thanks to sails gathering solar radiation from the “Old Sun”, crews live and die for their constant scavenging of “baubles”, closed gems inherited from various alien occupations, that only open from time to time… and are rumoured to contain all kinds of treasures. There’s no massive colonisation of other planets here, only little artificial worlds, scattered here and there, some in the shape of tubes, others using rotation to generate their gravity. This is a world of smuggling and piracy, of young women signing up with crews to leave their smothering father, and of rakish captains and resourceful sailors—all united by their love of money (qoins) and their fear of the legendary Bosa Sennen.

There were great moments in this story—from gritty and gorey close-combat scenes to tense moments between characters, from the cold, constricted yet fascinating baubles to the ominous presence of the Nightjammer when it was looming close—and hints of a world building that goes much deeper, thanks to the various bits the author gives here and there about the various Occupations. I wish the author had had room to develop this some more, especially when it came to the baubles and why they were left here: weaponry warehouses? Traps? Something else? Part of a much more complicated system?

A lot of the characters in this novel are not particularly nice at first sight. Adrana and Fura dream of adventure, and enlist on a ship to earn money for their father who lost a lot in bad investments (on top of having heart problems), but most of their drive still comes from a selfish desire (selfish because they don’t think of all the hurt they’ll cause) to escape a pampered rich girl’s fate. Probably they’re meant to marry to bring money in, though, and, in Fura’s case, there’s the matter of her father, as doting as he is, considering having a creepy doctor inject her with drugs so that her body will remain that of a child for more years to come. While the crew of the Monetta seems to be decent people, other are clearly cowardish, like captains trailing other ships to let them do most of the work in a bauble before entering it themselves, or, worse, jump them to steal their loot and kill them (Bosa is in the latter category). Vidin, from the beginning, was a thug who demolished a robot instead of just “preventing it from entering the shop”. And Fura herself isn’t blameless, becoming harder (understandable considering the hardships she’s been through) in a way that also makes her really callous at times (I’m thinking of the morning of her escape, more specifically).

However, even though this doesn’t make them too likeable, it also definitely fits the mood. There’s something dark and rotten in this world, highlighted by some of the loot found in baubles: cloth as black as the night, ghostly weapons and armor that seem to defy the laws of space itself, claustrophobic baubles where you can end up trap if you’ve got your auguries wrong (they open and close at set times, and if you’re trapped, nobody can get you out). Ships communicate and spy through the use of bones, ancient remnants of aliens long gone, which nobody truly understand; only teenagers can read them, before adulthood freezes their neural elasticity and makes them unable to process the kind of data travelling on the bones. And, in general, no mercy here: a tiny mistake will kill you, and some, like Bosa, have mastered and elevated cruelty to the rank of art.

Oddly enough, I quite liked Bosa. Maybe because of her way of talking, her strange suit, the legend she posed as… I admit I was a little disappointed when her goals were revealed, not because of what they were, but because of the way they were introduced—these would have deserved, I think, more details, and a different kind of exposition. This echoed the disjointedness I could feel at times, when the rhythm of the narrative became uneven; the beginning would be a good example of this, with the girls’ decision coming a little too fast to be believable (especially Fura’s—Adrana was introduced as wilder, but Fura seemed to be too mild and obedient to suddenly do such a 180). Things became more interesting once the girls were onboard the ship.

There’s a slight shift in the narrative style as well: the harder Fura becomes, the more her style veers from her more prim, ‘ladylike’ speech (even though she always keeps traces of it—as several characters are apt to point out). Although to be honest, I’m still on the fence when it comes to Fura’s growth: in spite of the hardships she encountered, I found it too quick, and not entirely justified by the a certain plot element supposed to make her more paranoid/prone to anger. I don’t know. It just seemed to extreme.

Still, I enjoyed the book, and am hoping there’ll be a sequel, so 3.5 stars it is.

Yzabel / July 15, 2015

Review: Dark Run

Dark Run by Mike Brooks

My rating: [rating=4]

Blurb:

The Keiko is a ship of smugglers, soldiers of fortune and adventurers, travelling Earth’s colony planets searching for the next job. And nobody talks about their past.

But when a face from Captain Ichabod Drift’s former life send them on a run to Old Earth, all the rules change.

Trust will be broken, and blood will be spilled.

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

This was a nicely-paced and fun read, in the vein of space cowboys/pirates/smugglers branch of sci-fi. More plot- and ambiance- than character-driven, but what I wanted to read when I requested this book was a romp in space with action, blazing guns, spaceships, fishy cargoes, crazy pilots and mercenaries… and this is exactly what I got.

The crew members of the Keiko find themselves embroiled into a mission for someone they don’t know. Only Captain Drift knows, and he didn’t accept so willingly, as the one who made the offer was obviously not a friend. While the motto on the ship is “nobody asks about your past”, some pasts are harder to forget and hide than others, and when everything turns to quagmire—because it always does, it always must, in such stories—and old secrets start surfacing back, everything gets tenser and tenser. What is more important, in the end: getting mad at the captain… or getting even when it comes to the mysterious employer?

While I wrote that this novel wasn’t exactly character-driven, it’s not completely true. I’d have to say that the characters are more of archetypal varieties that fit well into such stories. Think à la Firefly. The smooth-talking captain whose skill with words makes him an asset just as much as it causes him trouble. The stone-faced sniper/gunwoman who picked quite a few extra skills in her past. The mercenary going where the money is, but also wondering if it wouldn’t be time to retire. The pilot bailed out of jail and now earning her keep by flying the ship through maneuvers so hard nobody else would try them. The ex-gang member trying to keep his temper in check after it destroyed his life. And so on.

On the one hand, it made them somewhat flat, in that they had too much to do to fully reveal a lot about themselves. On the other hand, interspersed within the various plot points were still bits of information about who they were and/or had done. Even Jenna’s past, which is barely brushed upon, held a couple of hints. It may or may not be interesting, depending on what one would expect; however, for the kind of story I wanted to read when I picked the book, these characters still worked well. I also quite liked that they all reacted differently to Drift’s secret being exposed, yet still considered the biggest picture.

The setting itself was fun as well: again, archetypal, yet in a good way, with shady stations on asteroids, as well as more exotic planets pitched against Old Earth and its European and US “blocks” and air space crammed full of shuttles. Mostly the places the characters had to go to had a “feeling” of their own, with a gritty side for some, and a more noble one for others.

I admit I still would have wanted to know more about the characters, and to get to see a little further than the epilogue, as the gambit the crew took was really dangerous, and could have been exposed at any moment. In that regard, events were maybe just a bit too convenient for them, even though Jenna’s skills as a hacker did help a lot in planting information where it was needed to minimise the risks. This may very well warrant a second story of its own, where the crew would have to deal with the aftermath.

But, all in all, this book was a fun read, and this is what I’ll remember of it.

3.5 to 4 stars.