2021 SF, first in a five-book series. The big war is over, but
tensions are still high, and the possibility of a gold rush doesn't
make life any safer.
All right, I only have two series to work from, but I'm starting
to get a feel for Schwartz's strengths. Self-sufficient heroine,
wide-ranging adventure, serious ethical considerations. All right,
Nora Devi isn't a world-shaking sorcerer like Kira Aist, but when a
demand is made upon her, she gives serious consideration as to whether
answering it is the right thing to do—more than just "it would be fun"
or "the asker is family", because it is not her job to be the
guardian of everyone who can claim a relationship with her, and indeed
if she takes up that role it may well make both her and their lives
significantly worse.
Oh yeah, and world-building. The colony fleet went astray here and
couldn't get back, but there's some kind of psychic power that
afflicted the members of one particular exploration team; combined
with rare but potentially planet-destroying alien artefacts, that's
led to a system of royalty. There have been at least three prior
civilisations here before humans turned up, and if "Iguanese",
"Vapori" and "Silicaese" sound like placeholder names it's at least
easy to remember what each race was like.
And occasional weirdnesses of writing. I mean, this is already a
fairly unwieldy sentence:
The argument went that when the seven colony ships found themselves
unexpectedly in this sector and unable to re-enter the Origin black
hole's millrace to either return to Earth space or travel on to
their carefully researched, target system they panicked.
but it's made much worse by that comma. If I could only fix
punctuation rather than rephrase, I'd remove it and instead put one
after "millrace" and another after "system". Possibly also one after
"that".
But also, given the series title, we have this:
However, xeno-archaeology wasn't her passion. She'd fallen into that
lifestyle and found it interesting enough to pursue, but the
mysteries of the past didn't drive her.
O… kay? So you lured me in to the series by saying
"xeno-archaeologist" rather than "demon hunter" or whatever, and our
protagonist doesn't really care about it?
Still. There ire strange alien artefacts and space pirates and a
spoiled prince whose need to be kept happy has a blighting effect
There's a certain wild west feel (with the possibility of a gold rush
explicitly mentioned) and a whole array of space hazards. And a heroic
battlecruiser captain who's got on the wrong side of said spoiled
prince. All good fun so far.