2022 SF, fifth and last in its series. The expedition to the black
hole will change everything.
Well, there are sudden new powers, and a bit of an anticlimax as
far as the expedition itself is concerned, but I rather enjoyed this;
Schwartz doesn't go for sustained action. Rather, Nora spends the
majority of her time balancing the various forces that find her
useful, inconvenient, or just distracting, including modification of
the way each faction sees her. In a genre that tends to dismiss the
interpersonal stuff as "just politics", Schwartz clearly has huge
ambitions to do something a bit different in this SF story that looks
as though it might be regular space opera shelf-filler.
Is she the writer to bring it off? Not… quite. But so very nearly. As
I've found with Schwartz's other books, there's serious consideration
of the correct use of power, of the goals one should retain or discard
when one is uniquely powerful, and even of personal relationships:
this is a good person, potentially a friend if their loyalties weren't
split, but they aren't the right person for this job; but they'll be
much better suited to that one.
I don't know that I'd call Schwartz a hidden gem, exactly; there are
oddities of writing, there are unanswered questions and dangling plot
lines (some of them to be taken up in a sequel series, apparently),
and the whole thing seems crudely constructed at times. But I was able
to make it past those obstacles and enjoy this in a quiet way in spits
of its problems.