This really is quite something. A great big sprawling,old fashioned space opera, but one with a very modern sensibility. A book which works on both a galactic, and an intensely personal scale. A book which both draws on other books in the genre, but also does something very original. A novel which stretches hundreds of years into the future, but which is grounded in current concerns over climate change. A book which is broken into a series of sub plots told from different viewpoints, but which is tightly plotted and highly focussed.
The story starts with a little boy, Kaeda, living on a rural planet which is visited every fifteen years by traders in starships who buy their crops. Over his life he develops a relationship with the captain of a starship, Nia. Her starhip has a faster than light technology, which that she only ages by months between visits to Kaeda’s world. Kaeda’s story gives way to the of Nia and her crew, whose life bears a very close resemblance to that of the Serenity in Josh Weadon’s Firefly Tv series. From there we jump back to earth’s near future and Fumiko Nakajimo, a brilliant scientist whose technological advancements pave the way for her employer, the Umbai corporation to become the hegemony controlling Nia’s universe.
Nakajima gives way once more to Nia, and her adoption of a mysterious orphan boy who may hold the key to a new technology which will revolutionise the universe, but at what price? That question is probably the key theme of this book, what price are we prepared to pay in terms of human suffering in order to achieve technological advancement. It is also a book on a broad scale which addresses themes of commercial exploitation, both through extraction of natural resources and, possibly more insidiously, through tourism, but it also deals on an individual scale with conflict between ambition and love.
The contrasts in the book are never more apparent than in the fact that this galaxy spanning space opera which spreads over a timescale of hundreds of years is, at its heart the story ofthe love between a mother and an adopted child.
Absolutely terrific stuff
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