Head of Zeus, 2020, 489 p. Reviewed for ParSec 3.

Centuries ago a hardline segment of humanity, the Sturm, implacably opposed to genomic interventions, implants and bioware, was defeated and took itself off to far-flung reaches of space. In the interim the majority of humanity – at least its wealthier portions – has become used to relifes, their consciousnesses at intervals being decanted into younger cloned bodies, with neural backups held in case of accidents. Robotic artificial intelligences known as Intellects, each “an impossibly dense tear-drop of exotic matter and nanoscale wormhole processing matrices” perform many tasks. The human domain of the Greater Volume sprawls over the galaxy but even the quickest interstellar travel – carried out by folding space – takes subjective months to span it, though communications, through a zero point wormhole network, are much faster.

Birmingham’s story is told from five main viewpoints. Lieutenant Lucinda Hardy of the Royal Armadalen Navy, newly posted to a spaceship named the Defiant, is a first lifer with a pronounced case of impostor syndrome despite being decorated in her first military action during the Javan War; Frazer McLennan, of Scottish descent, is a veteran of the Terran Defence Force, on his seventh body and lately a prizewinning astroarchaeologist spending his time on the otherwise obscure planet Batavia where the Sturm had once crash-landed a ship; Sephina L’Trel is a kind of pirate whom we first meet in a firefight when her attempt to doublecross a group of Yakuza failed to go to plan; Princess Alessia Szu Suri sur Montanblanc ul Haq is a scion of a powerful family, much resentful of the apparently useless education to which she has been subjected; Corporal Booker 3-212162-930-Infantry is on death row, with a sadist as jailer. Occasional chapters are seen through the mind of Sturm Archon-Admiral Wenbo Strom.

This abundance of viewpoints is a little unwieldy at first as the shifts from one to the other tend to interrupt the flow and invites the question as to how they are all going to come together in the space of one book. The action soon kicks in though as a Sturm attack scrambles the minds of anything and anyone linked to the zero point network while their ships materialise in force.

Only the instant action of the Defiant’s Intellect to isolate itself from the ship’s systems to fight the intrusion saves its company but the commanding officers have been turned into ravening beasts and Lucinda has to take command. She gives orders for everyone to dump their neural mesh, without which the crew are left unconnected and face the risk of truly dying. The dumping involves expelling the mesh into the intestinal tract for removal in the usual way. Sephina barely escapes the Sturm attack with her life but her lover Arianne dies. Princess Alessia’s family is executed. She is captured and forced to cooperate with the Sturm but bravely uses eye-blinks to signal her resistance to the oral message she has to read. McLennan is also taken prisoner. But he and the Sturm have history. Booker brokers his life in return for helping his companions get away from the Sturm but only by having his consciousness decanted into a mechanical war rig. This moving of his consciousness from one machine to another neatly allows Birmingham to sideline the character for a while in an emergency external storage unit (a black box) but it is instrumental in the finale, wherein our heroes attempt to rescue the Princess.

Like the military characters here McLennan’s speech can tend to the earthy but personally it was delightful to see in an SF novel those less extreme but still expressive Scottish words numptie, walloper, dobber, skuddy and munter, (with jobbies perhaps a bit less relishable) but for true verisimilitude McLennan’s, “aren’t I?” really ought to have been, “amn’t I?”

Birmingham’s awareness of SF’s past is alluded to by his employment of the word soylent as a term for basic sustenance, and his alertness to present day concerns by a Sturm soldier’s assertion to McLennan, “But you will not replace us.”

Yet while the Sturm are frequently referred to as Nazis by our heroes, The Cruel Stars suffers from the flaw of most military SF in that the good guys are all but indistinguishable from their opponents in their willingness to resort to violence.

The Cruel Stars is incident packed, well plotted and has some relatable characters but the Sturm have not been beaten and the epilogue seems a bit too crudely designed to draw the reader towards the second of Birmingham’s trilogy.

Pedant’s corner:- a mixture of USian and “gaping maw” (it’s a stomach, not a mouth,) behooves (behoves,) “the chances …. was vanishingly small” (either ‘the chance … was’ or ‘the chances …were’ vanishingly small,) “the conne” (usually spelled ‘con’.) “Sirens and Klaxons sounded” (there’s no need for that capital ‘K’,) skuddy (usually spelled scuddy,) “the series of booms that followed were louder” (the series …was louder,) “that none of the deaed were about to reanimate” (none … was about to,) spit (spat.) “None of them were there by choice” (none of them was there by choice.) “There were a number of personal items” (there was a number.) “With that one convulsive leap he was free” (I couldn’t quite make up my mind if this cliché was exactly that or an ironic nod to the past of periodical fiction.) “Darkly complected” (is complected a proper word? ‘With a dark complexion’ would work fine,) “one ship, broken and venting flames” (venting flames in space? I don’t think so; flames require an oxygen supply to sustain themselves,) “if they try to scuttle the ship” (I would submit you can not scuttle a space ship. Destroy it, yes; scuttle it, no,) “but nae” (this was McLennan; that negative should be ‘but naw’,) “the Cub Scouts” (known in the UK as simply ‘the Cubs’,) “but we dinnae get them all” (didnae.)

Orbit, 2016, 459 p.

On the face of it Space Opera is about the grand scale – a galaxy spanning sweep, ultra- advanced technology, a clash of cultures, an indisputable villain or species thereof. Yet to every tale there must be the small scale, a human, or at least intelligible to human, consequence to it; individuals at risk, conflict meaningful to them, struggles and enemies to be overcome. Getting the balance right, not letting the imposing overpower the down-to-earth or having the colossal so remote as to be intangible, is tricky. In Ancestral Machines Cobley has had fun with the trappings, let rip the invention, but tagged it to a time-honoured plot, with a few extras thrown in for good measure. It reads as an extravagant pastiche of all that is good – and some that isn’t – of the sub-genre.

To satisfy the sense of wonder which Space Opera strives to evoke we have here planets being whisked away to be substituted by others then lined up in a huge array lit/powered by an artificial sun, a supposedly impregnable habitat inside a star, portable wormhole generators. The humans caught up in this are the crew of the smuggler spaceship Scarabus, captained by Brannan Pyke and separately (to begin with) Earthsphere drone Rensik Estemil, delegated along with female Lieutenant Sam Brock to infiltrate the domains of The Great Harbour of Benevolent Harmony – now taken over by dastardly aliens – and, if possible, thwart their designs.

As is common in this type of thing we have apostrophously named aliens such as G’Brozen Mav and T’Loshkin Rey; extravagantly titled soldier types – Akreen, First Blade of the Zavri, whose head is filled with the thoughts of ancestors/previous inhabitants of his body; all but unpronounceable would-be masters of the universe, the Xra-Lords. These latter have an utterly preposterous bodily modification. The whole is larded with information dumps and infilling of background. Some conversations take place purely to relay information, Pyke communicates almost solely with would-be drollery, others use arch knowingness.

The prose is also redolent of the less serious end of the sub-genre with turns of phrase such as “strange roseate ripples began rippling across the sky” repeating a word in close proximity and sentences such as, “The Shadow Bastion was suddenly revealed in almost all its entirety,” which don’t quite cohere. Characters aren’t clothed but garbed, battle descriptions are over-wrought and over-written, and there are innumerable neologisms. Fans of this kind of Space Opera will lap it all up.

Pedant’s corner:- “Time interval” later – or equivalent count; over 50. Otherwise; Moja (elsewhere Mojag,) a missing end quotation mark, “a woody slope” (wooded,) “and a handful and his Shuroga scout” (and a handful of his Shuroga scout,) “limbs akimbo” (it would be interesting to see legs resting on their own hips. Later there was a “legs akimbo”,) “and was about duck under” (about to duck under,) “their armed escort were remaining outside” (was remaining,) miniscule (minuscule,) “the noise level reached a crescendo” (a crescendo is a process, not that process’s end – ‘reached a climax’,) “building the cacophony to a crescendo” (ditto,) maw in the sense of mouth (a maw is a stomach.) “Second later” (either ‘A second later’ or ‘Seconds later’.) “The only ocean life currently visible were small paddling creatures and shoals of tiny swimmers” (the only ocean life … was …,) staunching (stanching.)

“Two thousand million or so years ago two galaxies were colliding; or, rather, were passing through each other,” is the first sentence of E E ‘Doc’ Smith‘s Triplanetary, the first in his Lensman series. I read it at an impressionable young age and that sentence has stuck with me ever since, probably because the concept struck my young mind as awesome. (Awesome in the British sense and not as our USian cousins use the term, almost as a throwaway.)

Smith wasn’t the greatest stylist (he wasn’t a stylist at all) and his characterisation was rudimentary but he more or less invented space opera. About the only things I can remember about the Lensman series is that first sentence and the frequently repeated call sign (no doubt modelled on William Joyce as “Lord Haw-Haw“) “This is Helmuth, speaking for Boskone.”

Anyway, this, from Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) for 23/5/18, is a picture of two galaxies (NGC 4038 and NGC 4039) colliding; or, rather, passing through each other, not two thousand million years ago but for the last 100 million at least.

The two galaxies are known as the antennae. A wider angle (which was featured on APOD on 29/4/2011) shows why.

In response to Gareth Powell’s list Ian Sales has posted his own. Typically of Ian his choices are idiosyncratic. I note he sneaks in more than ten too.

My strike rate here is much lower.

Judgment Night, CL Moore (1952)
Empire Star, Samuel R Delany (1966)
Valérian and Laureline, Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières (1967 – present)
The Children of Anthi and Requiem for Anthi, Jay D Blakeney (1985 – 1990)
Master of Paxwax and The Fall of the Families, Phillip Mann (1986 – 1987)
Take Back Plenty, Colin Greenland (1990)
An Exchange of Hostages, Prisoner of Conscience and Hour of Judgement, Susan R Matthews (1997 – 1999)
The Prodigal Sun, The Dying Light and A Dark Imbalance, Sean Williams & Shane Dix (1999 – 2001)
The Risen Empire and The Killing of Worlds, Scott Westerfeld (2003)
Spirit, or the Princess of Bois Dormant, Gwyneth Jones (2008)

Another list.

According to Wikipedia “Space Opera is a subgenre of science fiction that often emphasizes romantic, often melodramatic adventure, set mainly or entirely in outer space, usually involving conflict between opponents possessing advanced abilities, weapons, and other technology.”

Partly as a comment on the sub-genre and also as an attempt to subvert it I provided my own novel A Son of the Rock with the tagline “A Space Libretto” mainly because – while it roamed the spaceways and deployed technology – advanced abilities and weapons were largely, if not completely, absent.

As to Space Opera itself, Gareth Powell has posted a list of what he considers a Top Ten of Space Operas on his website. It leans heavily towards relatively recent works.

As you can see I’ve read all but three of them.

Nova by Samuel R. Delany
The Centauri Device by M. John Harrison
Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks
A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge
Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
The Reality Dysfunction By Peter F. Hamilton
Leviathan Wakes by James SA Corey
Space by Stephen Baxter
Excession by Iain M. Banks

Tor, 2012, 359p.

After a strange encounter with a renegade, when a dangerous piece of technology, an instantiation lattice, is forcibly inserted into his brain, information specialist Luc Gabion is called in to investigate the murder of a member of the Temur Council, one of the Thousand Emperors of the title, rulers of the Tian-Di, half of the two parts into which humanity had split after the events of Gibson’s previous novel Final Days.

Thereafter we are plunged into a mix of power politics, interstellar intrigue and action sequences with all the attendant skiffy stuff – armed insect–like machines called mechants, jump gates, books that release their contents on contact, enhanced humans with disseminated consciousnesses – of which devotees of Space Opera are fond.

I have a feeling that Gibson may have rushed this one; or else was squeezing too much into his word count. Quite a lot of the background information was revealed through dialogue and as a consequence seemed unnatural. (Yes, no-one in novels actually “talks” as in real life; but even so.) The mayhem count will please those who like that sort of thing though

Curiously a crime was “perpetuated” at one point but “perpetrate” was used later in an appropriate fashion. Compared to Final Days there was an increased span count of 5 here – though there was one “spun.”

Orbit, 2011. 467p.

This is the third and final part of the Humanity’s Fire trilogy which I have reviewed previously here and here.

The Ascendant Stars follows the template set out before, a multi-stranded narrative which tends to break up the story’s flow. Indeed, Cobley’s fertile imagination has stacked his tale with so many alien races, so many strands, that sometimes it is difficult to keep track – even with a glossary and a dramatis personae.

As in Humanity’s Fire’s part 2, The Orphaned Worlds, the focus is not so much on the Scots/Scandinavian/Russian world of Darien and its attendant moon Nivyesta – though the Legion of Avatars is finally loosed from its long imprisonment in the warpwell – and yet another new race, the Imisil, pops up to play a bit part. The Darien Scots are occasionally allowed to speak broadly but this dialogue, when it appears, somehow seems too out of place in all the intergalactic mayhem. Paradoxically if all the speech were in this vein it would perhaps be less noticeable.

Two writerly tics were particularly in evidence here. Quite often our viewpoint character is in danger of some sort – of imminent death even – only to be saved by the intervention of a companion/third party and, as in The Orphaned Worlds, the formulations “seconds later” and “minutes later” abound. There is an almost breathless rush to pack in all the incident. And incident there is aplenty. There is so much plot going on here that in many cases it has to be told rather than shown.

It may be that Cobley’s canvas is just too broad. Scaling down the action of a Space Opera is perhaps counter intuitive but doing so might have enhanced the human aspects of the story. With so much going on the characters do not get enough time to breathe as people. As a result the emotional pay-off of the dénouement lacks the impact it might have had.