2020 space-operatic SF, first of a planned trilogy. Sun is the
daughter and heir-presumptive of Queen-Marshal Eirene, who turned the
Chaonian Republic from a defeated mess into a strong if fragile
interstellar power. She's just won her own first naval victory. But
there are enemies both internal and external…
So basically it's a space opera modelled on the life of Alexander
the Great with most of the sexes swapped. I'm not familiar with
Alexander's history in any sort of detail, though I recognise some
bits here and there and I can see that it's a loose inspiration more
than a slavish retelling; but it does have implications for the
technology, because after all if you're going to be Alexander in space
you need to be able to win a space battle by faking a disorderly
retreat to encourage the enemy to chase you.
But while there's plenty of action, both in space and on land, the
focus is on Sun herself and on her relationships with her Companions
(not favourites, more hostages-turned-friends) and the Companions'
companions ("cee-cees", which just sounds silly to me). While there
are quite a few viewpoints, the one I enjoyed most was that of
Persephone Lee, newly nominated as a Companion, from a noble house
that's definitely scheming for power… but is it actually colluding
with one or another set of foreign enemies, or is it just helping them
by accident with the confusion it causes?
There's a fair bit of infodumping up front but once the story proper
starts it keeps moving at a very fast pace. This is the sort of
epic-scale space opera (for all it's confined to a small number of
solar systems so far) that I don't often read because too often it
falls into simplistic militarism or "I'm right because I'm the
protagonist"; but everyone here makes mistakes, ones that are
consistent with who they are, and that goes a long way towards keeping
them human rather than larger-than-life hero-figures. Rather than bad
guys, we have people who are doing what they think is best not only
for their faction but for their nation as a whole (all right, they may
conflate those a little more than can really be justified).
There's even an acknowledgement that this state has common people in
it as well as shiny aristocrats with teeth that go ting, and that
maybe it's not always doing a great job of looking after them…
On the tech side we have an enemy empire that does genetic
modification so that most of its people are four-armed and some have
exoskeleta; and the beacon system that works like warp gates (Landis
1.4.11, go to known point A and turn on the drive and you arrive at
known point B) except that, while these beacons are clearly artefacts,
nobody knows how they work any more, and some of them don't.
There's a thoroughgoing sense of fun here even as bad things happen
to good people; too many authors would wallow in the grimness, but
these characters don't have time for that, they need to get on with
the next desperate action against a superior enemy.
I look forward to further volumes.
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