RogerBW's Blog

Deep Black, Miles Cameron 30 October 2024

2024 SF, second of its series. The crew of the greatship Athens has found out something about what's been going on. Now she has to make it home.

Eventually. This is a long book at 140,000 words, and not a quick read. Protagonist and viewpoint character Marca Nbaro continues to be great at whatever she turns her hand to, to the extent that her superiors actually ask her to dial back the heroism a bit (this doesn't happen). She's juggling multiple shipboard jobs including some very secret ones, and a romance, and even the enhanced mental abilities granted by neural lace only go so far.

But where the first book was Nbaro learning her job and trying not to be caught in deceptions, this one is Nbaro trying to stay alive as a primarily trading ship has to shift to a warship footing in order to get through everything various enemies can throw against them. This will take not only grit and preparedness for battle but diplomacy and politics, and if it sometimes feels implausible that Nbaro should be involved in all these things it does at least surprise her too.

There's a side plot as Nbaro comes to realise just how much her life has been orchestrated, and by whom, and that she really has no other option than to accept "I did it for the best".

As in the first book, there's an appearance of crunchy technical detail which doesn't quite hold up when you poke it closely. I have to assume that Cameron's intended audience is more people who will be impressed by sciency-sounding words than people who will use his numbers to check his maths.

It's not clear at this point whether the series will continue, though certainly some things are left unresolved here; if it does, the third book will be quite different again.

[Buy this at Amazon] and help support the blog. ["As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases."]

Previous in series: Artifact Space | Series: Arcana Imperii

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