Tag: Space Opera

I don’t know what it is, but for some reason, in the warmer months my reading tastes gravitate strongly toward science fiction (and the occasional horror book). I associate fantasy with the cooler months. Why this is, I’ve never really figured out; I’ve read many a fantasy novel set in warm locales, so it’s not as if the cooling weather puts me in mind of the snowy journeys through the Misty Mountains in The Lord of the Rings. This isn’t to say that I won’t read any fantasy at all during the warm periods, but…well, summer is when I want lots of exploding spaceships.

So, here’s the skinny on three space opera books I’ve read of late!

:: The first was, technically, a re-read of The Warrior’s Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold. This is the first novel in the ongoing saga of Miles Vorkosigan, one of the most famous characters in contemporary SF. I read this book before, several years ago, and I enjoyed it, but for one reason or another I never continued with the Vorkosigan series. No real reason why, really; I just never got around to it until I’d reached a point where I figured that if I was going to continue with the series, I should just start over.

The Warrior’s Apprentice starts with Miles Vorkosigan undergoing the final physical trial he needs to complete before he can enter the military service of Barrayar, his homeworld. Barrayar places supreme importance on its military, but getting in will be difficult for Miles, because he is physically disabled. He is barely five feet tall, and his bones are extremely brittle and prone to breaking. Sure enough, he breaks both his legs in the first minutes of the trial, and Miles is forced to take on the life of a mercenary.

He actually isn’t really forced into that life, per se, so much as he just kind of steps into one situation after another that causes a mercenary crew to just naturally gravitate toward him. It’s a fascinating thing that Bujold does here: she depicts a character with enormous personal magnetism who uses it to his advantage without ever really seeming totally aware of it.

The Miles Vorkosigan tales aren’t “sensawunda” space operas; they’re as character-driven as just about any story can be. I look forward to reading more of them.

:: Starpilot’s Grave, by Debra Doyle and James MacDonald, is the second book in their “Mageworlds” series. The adventures of Beka Rosselin-Metadi continue, along with her various friends from the first book, The Price of the Stars. The earlier book established a galaxy that is post-war, a war against a group of villains hailing from ‘the Mageworlds’. Here, Doyle and MacDonald set up the resumption of those hostilities, and by the end of the book, war has broken out again, with our heroine, Beka Rosselin-Metadi, assuming a leadership rule. Not a whole lot that happens in this book is a surprise, as it is clearly setting up the third act in the trilogy. It’s all somewhat Star Wars-like, in general feel, and it’s a fun read that isn’t terribly demanding. My main complaint, as with Price of the Stars, is that there is still little explanation as to who the Mages actually are or why they are to be feared. I hope this is explained more in the final volume.

:: Finally, John Scalzi’s The Last Colony was the third and final book in his Old Man’s War trilogy, until he went and added a fourth book, making it not a trilogy anymore. Oh well. As with the first two books, this is a fast-paced and involving read that suggests a whole bunch of nifty Sfnal questions without slowing the pace enough to delve into answers. We rejoin our heroes from the first novel, John Perry and his wife Jane Sagan, who have adopted a girl named Zoe from the second book. They are asked by the Colonial government to head up a secret colony whose location is to be kept secret…because, it turns out, an alliance of aliens is systematically destroying colonies they deem to be “unauthorized”. Lots of hilarity ensues: resistance against the aliens, coupled with the fact that they can no longer rely on their own government to be honest with them or give them aid.

Some of my key questions about this whole universe, dating back to Old Man’s War, are finally explained, which is nice, and Scalzi gets a pot boiling quite nicely, creating a definite sense of tension as he depicts on the one hand an alien force that seems well nigh unstoppable and on the other depicts a group of colonists struggling to find an answer to a problem that is seemingly unsolvable. My main issue with the book lies with the nature of the final solution itself; in all honesty, it kind of seems to come out of left field and only barely manages to avoid feeling like an outright deus ex machina. But it’s my understanding that some of this background is explained in a fourth book in the series, which focuses on the Perrys’ daughter, Zoe.

More space opera to come!

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A couple of book notes:

:: A while back, Michael May recommended a book called Napoleon’s Pyramids, which sounded right up my alley:

I had high hopes for Napoleon’s Pyramids. It promised a lot: a swashbuckling hero, a mysterious medallion, an evil count, and an Indiana Jones-esque adventure to unlock the secrets of the pyramids. I’ve learned to be skeptical though about stories that sound too good to be true. There’s always something wrong. The hero is unlikable, the Maguffin is dull, the villain is unbelievable, or the adventure is a bait-and-switch that promises much more than it ever intended to deliver. Napoleon’s Pyramids has none of these problems. It’s exactly what it claims to be and so much more.

I’ll second his recommendation, with one caveat. This book is like a cross between Indiana Jones and the National Treasure movies, set in the Napoleonic era. There are secret societies, ancient prophecies, present-day people who are guardians of ancient lore, exciting chases, thrilling escapes, and interesting characters. You have the French army, the English navy, American spies, mysterious Egyptians, and even Gypsies. All this is mixed together in a plot that is a lot of fun — so much so that you expect to hear music by John Williams or Jerry Goldsmith while you read it.

The book’s pacing slows down a bit as we move into the middle third of the book, but as soon as I became concerned about that, the book picked right back up again. There are twists that are predictable, but I think those are there to distract attention from the twists that are not predictable — and there are quite a few of those.

My one caveat, that I mention above? Michael May did mention that the book is the start of a series. He did not mention that this one ends on a cliffhanger. Aieee!!!

:: Grease Monkey is fantastic. I loved it. What is Grease Monkey? It’s a graphic novel, originally serialized online but now available in a trade paperback, about a young mechanic who comes to live on a giant space cruiser, where he hopes to get a job working on the fighter ships. He is assigned to work with Mac Gimbensky, the very experienced, and very crusty, older mechanic who just happens to be a gorilla.

All of this is in the wake of an alien invasion of Earth, and a subsequent visit by aliens who “uplift” gorillas to human levels of intelligence. The book tells the story of their unfolding relationship, and their trials and tribulations on an immense warship that is a society of its own, with competing squadrons, weaselly mechanics out to steal each others’ secrets, cranky librarians, military officers who desperately want control over everything, and, as our young hero discovers, girls.

As a collected webcomic, Grease Monkey is pretty episodic in structure; there’s no plot that ties everything together, but there are arcs to follow as creator Tim Eldred opens up more and more of his world. The entire story, though, takes place on this one ship, and the whole conceit is great; it’s wonderfully refreshing to read a SF/space opera story where the Admirals and Captains are only supporting characters, and we instead focus on the mechanics who are just trying to keep the fighters flying and find time in between to have dates and read their favorite books.

Grease Monkey also has a wonderful sense of humor. I laughed out loud plenty of times while reading it, and some of the chapters turn out to be elaborate set-ups for jokes that only pay off in the very last panel or two.

Grease Monkey is great stuff. Read it!

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A while back I bought a copy of Kate Elliott’s novel Jaran on the assumption that it was, at least kinda-sorta, a space opera. It turns out to not really be a space opera at all; it’s more of a future planetary romance type of book. No matter; those are only matters of taxonomy and nomenclature. It’s not a space opera simply because very little of it takes place in space.

So what is Jaran about, then? It turns out to be a science fictional romance story, as well as a tale of an epic journey, a clash-of-cultures novel, and a quite wonderful character study. I actually started the book a year or two ago, read a few chapters, and then put it aside — not, if I recall correctly, out of any negative feeling for the book but because something else came along that I really wanted to read instead right at that moment. The last Harry Potter book or maybe a Guy Gavriel Kay book. Something like that. So I finally got back to Jaran, and in a lot of ways I didn’t want it to end (which is nice because it’s the first book in a four-book series).

Terese Soerensen (known as “Tess” to friends) is the sister of Charles Soerensen, a human who has been given a Dukedom over a number of worlds by humanity’s apparently gracious conquerors, that Chapalii. As sister to a very important man, Tess has a number of responsibilities and obligations that she is less than thrilled about pursuing, especially after her fiance breaks her heart, so she decides to eschew her duties in favor of traveling to a world called Rhui, where she wants to bury herself in linguistic studies. But on her way there, she finds evidence of some kind of odd plot involving humanity’s Chapalii conquerors, so she follows the evidence and ends up stranded in the middle of the grassy steppes of a vast continent. She soon meets the locals, who are human — but who are not technological, and instead live a nomadic existence with the horse as their primary mode of transportation.

These people are known as Jaran, and the first one she meets is one of the most important of all Jaran, a man who wants nothing more than to unite all of the fractious, often-warlike tribes under one banner. His name is Ilya Bakhtiian, and he is unlike any person Tess has ever known.

Over the course of the rest of the novel — and all of this set-up takes about twenty pages — Tess will have to learn a new culture, travel across a continent by horse, investigate the doings of the Chapalii on a planet they’re not even supposed to be on, come to terms with her own emotional pain, and work through her increasingly complex feelings for Ilya Bakhtiian. All of this makes for one of the finer “character-driven” stories I’ve read recently.

I suppose it’s not much of a spoiler to note that Tess and Ilya do fall in love with one another, but the book is praiseworthy for the way it develops their relationship. Both characters are complex and flawed, and their relationship is full of strife and hardship. There were plenty of times when I wanted to slap either Tess or Ilya or both upside the head, and that’s actually a good thing, as that means I had come to care about these people.

Elliott also displays a good gift for language, especially as she creates the recognizable, and yet alien, culture of the Jaran. They all tend to speak with unexpected cadences and rhythms, and the depiction of a matriarchal culture doesn’t feel at all contrived as some SFnal matriarchies do. Many such societies end up seeming like regular old patriarchies with the genders switched, but Elliott avoids that trap in a number of interesting ways.

Here is a passage that I particularly admired. Here, Ilya Bakhtiian is talking to Niko, a wise elder, about his conflicted feelings for Tess and what those feelings may mean for his dream of uniting all the Jaran:

“Loving a woman and wanting a woman are not the same thing.”

Ilya simply stared at him [Niko], perplexed. “Of course, to desire a woman only because she is pretty–“

“I am not speaking of anything so simple. Listen to me, my boy. When you came back from Jeds, you had found the path you were destined to ride, knowing that it would bring you fame that no other jaran had found before you. But the gods play this game with us, challenging us to strive for fame, and yet how many of us can ever hope to beat their players: the wind that never ceases, the deep earth, the rain that dissolves the ashes of the dead, the unbounded sky, and the silent stars. They play their game well. They have only to wait us out to win.”

The rising sun laced hsi pale hair with silver. “Yet now and again, a man or a woman is born who has weapons against these opponents, one who can command quiet, who can see beyond death, one who can hold fire to the old ways and let them burn. You are such a man. You can change the jaran. You are changing them. You can leave this world with a name that will live forever. You can win that game.” He fell silent. Two women spoke in low voices from the etsana’s tent, too far away for words to be distinguishable. From the farther edge of camp, a man hallooed, and a child yelped and laughed.

“But you will die in any case, Ilyakoria. What good is everlasting fame to a man if he dies unloved?”

A wind had come up. It touched Ilya’s hair, stirring it like a whisper.

“Love, Ilya. That is what we who are mortal have been gifted, a gift never given adn never known by the undying. The wind cannot love the plain, but I can love the plain, and I can love much more than that and be loved in return. Fame is something you want. A woman is someone you love.”

(I’m finding, more and more, that I’m less and less interested in stories that don’t have some component of a love story within them. This doesn’t mean that I want every book to be a romance, but it does mean that books where love is not a theme are turning out less interesting to me. I’m not sure why this is the case, but it’s something I’ve noticed in my reading lately in terms of the trends I’ve seen in my reactions to the books I’ve been reading.)

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Time to catch up on some recent reading!

:: Sports From Hell: My Search for the World’s Dumbest Competition by Rick Reilly is a fun piece of sportswriting in which Reilly travels the world in search of really bizarre sports. The ones he finds are both familiar (the “Rock Paper Scissors” championships) and utterly unexpected (World Sauna Championships). Some of these he tries, some he only watches from afar, but all in all, the book is a funny and fascinating look into the world of organized competition. Despite having built a society, we humans still revere competition and have a biological need for it, so we’ll end up competing in anything. Such as, who can sit in an extremely hot sauna (261 degrees) for the longest, or who can sit the longest at a poker table that’s been set up in the middle of an arena into which an angry bull has just been released, or who can hold out the longest after having a ferret dropped into their pants and their belts and cuffs taped shut. Yes, that ferret-in-the-pants thing is real. It’s the cover photo of the book.

Some of the sports are surreal not just for the events themselves, but for the context in which they are played. The bull poker, for example: that one takes place in a prison in Louisiana, and the competitors are inmates. The warden makes a case that allowing competitions like this gives inmates some form of dignity, but Reilly creates an interesting juxtaposition when, at the end of the chapter, after an inmate named Rocky has won the bull poker competition, he gives the reaction of the father of the girl whose murder Rocky is in the pen for in the first place. “I didn’t know that someone who raped and murdered an innocent person would get to ride in a rodeo. That doesn’t sound like hard labor to me.”

My favorite chapter was the one on baseball. Not some kind of special baseball that they play in white-water rapids, or on top of a mountain, or something weird like that. Just regular old Major League Baseball. Now, I used to be as big a fan of baseball as anyone, but various things have sapped my enthusiasm for the game. First, my favorite team has sucked for almost two decades. Second, we haven’t had cable in years, so following baseball is basically a “checking the boxscores online or in the paper” thing now. But third, really — the game has become longer and longer and duller and duller. Hence Reilly’s first complaint, that “Baseball is as dull as Amish porn.” That whole chapter is as good a rant as I’ve read in a while. Here’s a taste:

3. Writers somehow think baseball is male childbirth.

There’s no bigger gap in any sport than the one between misty-eyed Jack Kerouac-quoting baseball writers and red-eyed Jack Daniels-drinking baseball players. Press-box poets like George Will are always waxing nostalgic about the game; everything is roses and sepia tones and tearstained “catches” with Dad. They’ll see some rookie standing with some old vet in the outfield and say, “Imagine the lessons being handed down.” And having been around the game my whole life, having played it, I can tell you the lessons. The old vet is saying, “You see the blonde with the rack sitting behind the dugout? She likes power tools.”

:: Two space opera novels recently joined the ranks of…space opera novels I’ve read. Prophets by S. Andrew Swann (book one of a series called Apotheosis) was a fairly quick and breezy read. Not that it’s a light book, by any means, but it’s fairly short and it’s divided into short chapters, which always helps the pacing along. The book posits a complex spacefaring human society in which there are several groups constantly vying for power (an Islamic Caliphate and the Roman Catholic Church among them) when the existence of a lost human colony, way out in space, is discovered. There’s a race against time to get out there and see what’s going on…and of course, there’s a lot more going on than a simple lost colony.

This is, as noted above, the first book in a series, and from what I’ve gathered, this series is a sequel series to an earlier series by Swann, so I have some catch-up reading to do. This was a fun, fast-paced space adventure story.

:: Also fun, but not quite so fast-paced, but wildly adventurous, is Judas Unchained by Peter F. Hamilton. This is the sequel volume to his earlier Pandora’s Star (previously discussed), and it’s about as long — 1000 pages of space opera goodness. I can’t say too much about it, since it is literally the second half of a pretty massive story, but I did greatly appreciate how Hamilton is mostly able to bring all of the various storylines — and there are a lot of them — together in fairly convincing fashion. The pace really picks up in the last two hundred pages, leading to a nicely whiz-bang conclusion. The series also has lots of ideas and managed to keep me nervous about the fates of characters even in a universe in which death has been rendered an impermanent state. This duology is long, but it’s very impressive. I’m already looking forward to The Dreaming Void, which kicks off a new series set in the same universe.

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