RogerBW's Blog

1987 sf. On the gas giant moons of Orestes and Electra, a harsh honour code has been mellowed by allowing "social death" to replace execution. But the system still isn't stable.

To a large extent this is a picaresque: we spend much of the early part of the book touring the world, and seeing how this society works—and its tension points. When those tensions break through, things shift to more of an action story, though it's still primarily about the individuals and how events affect them than it is about clever tactics.

The demands of the picaresque form, and of the later political and military elements, leave the viewpoint characters perhaps short of motivation: we have two principals, both off-worlders, Leith Moraghan who's left a military career due to injury and age (at 20!) to captain a regular mail ship, and Trey Maturin, a trained mediator who's also acting as a "medium", someone who's allowed to notice the socially-dead without "dying" himself. But at the start of the book they're both more or less happy with their lot, or at least not setiing out to change things; they do eventually find themselves forced to act, but they aren't go-getting protagonists.

But the world-building is splendid, based on the well-worn SF tropes of a long isolation between settlement and rediscovery and a harsher world than expected leading to strict societal rules but taking that standard premise and doing really interesting things with it—especially since we learn about the arts and culture of this world, and how they've been affected by the code.

Not a "usual" sort of SF book, but I rather enjoyed it.