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A review by theaurochs
The Vela by Becky Chambers, Rivers Solomon, Yoon Ha Lee, S.L. Huang
2.0
A mediocre and run-of-the-mill sci-fi adventure story. Particularly listening to the audio version (by many accounts the preferred way to experience this), it is a strongly serialised story that feels distinctly like a mid-budget tv show more than a cohesive novel. You can feel the different authors pushing and pulling in different directions, which gives a result that is less than the sum of its already underwhelming parts. Also much like a mid-budget tv show, it wraps up without any real satisfying conclusions, left to the whims of the network as to whether or not we will ever see an end to the story.
The story follows an older grizzled mercenary as she is teamed up with the precocious young child of the president of one of the planets in a star system with many inhabitable planets. The star at the centre of the system has been mined for fuel and as such is growing colder, rendering the outer planets uninhabitable and provided the catalyst for the societal drama. The Merc & the Child are tasked with locating a missing refugee ship, which sends them on an interplanetary adventure, coming into contact with people on different sides of various conflicts, and primarily the approximately five important people in the solar system. I realise that by some necessity, the characters we meet in any plot should be important to the narrative and the events, but here it feels so small-scale, in the two main characters have to come into contact with the leaders of every faction. It’s almost Forrest Gump in its levels of convenience and being in the right place at the right time. It lends a feeling of the two main characters being the player characters in a video game, and the whole universe is just there waiting for them to interact with; nothing important could possibly happen without their presence.
This might be less of a problem if either of these characters were interesting, but that unfortunately is not the case. Grizzled Old Merc is a pretty stock Grizzled Old Merc character, and Young Precocious Child is the same for that trope. The different writers for different chapters mean that their characterisations vary too much to really be consistent or satisfying, and their abilities veer wildly as the plot demands. By halfway through, Grizzled Old Merc is a superhuman pilot, flying an aged ship through state-of-the-art attack drones, while Young Precocious Child hacks through the state-of-the-art security system; rendering them as superheroes who can solve any challenge with no setbacks. So now, we’ve removed any element of stakes from the plot. We spend the rest of the series bouncing from location to location to chase down macguffins and Important Characters, before the inevitable final act massive battle. Side note on characters- I appreciate having a gender-neutral main character in Young Precocious Child, but I don't think it was handled very well in this case- particularly there were some specific instances where Young Precocious Child assumes other people's genders in really noticeable ways, which seems like a dick move (to this gender-neutral-pronoun-using-person, anyway).
Right ok, so we don’t have any interesting characters, the plot is fairly rudimentary and without interesting stakes. What else could be said to be going for this story? Certainly not the worldbuilding. The tech is frustratingly handwavey and matches whatever level is required for the plot at that time. There is a deep lack of internal consistency which prevents it from ever really presenting a believable world. But worse than unbelievable, there is nothing novel or interesting presented here either. It feels like such a stock world, with default space empire #2 only vaguely changed from the standard settings. The outer planets slowly becoming less habitable does allow for some exploration of what it means to be a refugee- the troubles of maintaining a cultural identity in the face of displacement, and the struggle to create such identities in the face of marginalisation and repression. This is probably the largest redeeming feature, but even that is handled somewhat haphazardly, and with varying deftness depending on which exact author is writing the chapter.
A forgettable sci-fi romp that does a disservice to the several authors involved in its creation; the joint effort shows off more of their weak point without allowing their strengths to shine through.
The story follows an older grizzled mercenary as she is teamed up with the precocious young child of the president of one of the planets in a star system with many inhabitable planets. The star at the centre of the system has been mined for fuel and as such is growing colder, rendering the outer planets uninhabitable and provided the catalyst for the societal drama. The Merc & the Child are tasked with locating a missing refugee ship, which sends them on an interplanetary adventure, coming into contact with people on different sides of various conflicts, and primarily the approximately five important people in the solar system. I realise that by some necessity, the characters we meet in any plot should be important to the narrative and the events, but here it feels so small-scale, in the two main characters have to come into contact with the leaders of every faction. It’s almost Forrest Gump in its levels of convenience and being in the right place at the right time. It lends a feeling of the two main characters being the player characters in a video game, and the whole universe is just there waiting for them to interact with; nothing important could possibly happen without their presence.
This might be less of a problem if either of these characters were interesting, but that unfortunately is not the case. Grizzled Old Merc is a pretty stock Grizzled Old Merc character, and Young Precocious Child is the same for that trope. The different writers for different chapters mean that their characterisations vary too much to really be consistent or satisfying, and their abilities veer wildly as the plot demands. By halfway through, Grizzled Old Merc is a superhuman pilot, flying an aged ship through state-of-the-art attack drones, while Young Precocious Child hacks through the state-of-the-art security system; rendering them as superheroes who can solve any challenge with no setbacks. So now, we’ve removed any element of stakes from the plot. We spend the rest of the series bouncing from location to location to chase down macguffins and Important Characters, before the inevitable final act massive battle. Side note on characters- I appreciate having a gender-neutral main character in Young Precocious Child, but I don't think it was handled very well in this case- particularly there were some specific instances where Young Precocious Child assumes other people's genders in really noticeable ways, which seems like a dick move (to this gender-neutral-pronoun-using-person, anyway).
Right ok, so we don’t have any interesting characters, the plot is fairly rudimentary and without interesting stakes. What else could be said to be going for this story? Certainly not the worldbuilding. The tech is frustratingly handwavey and matches whatever level is required for the plot at that time. There is a deep lack of internal consistency which prevents it from ever really presenting a believable world. But worse than unbelievable, there is nothing novel or interesting presented here either. It feels like such a stock world, with default space empire #2 only vaguely changed from the standard settings. The outer planets slowly becoming less habitable does allow for some exploration of what it means to be a refugee- the troubles of maintaining a cultural identity in the face of displacement, and the struggle to create such identities in the face of marginalisation and repression. This is probably the largest redeeming feature, but even that is handled somewhat haphazardly, and with varying deftness depending on which exact author is writing the chapter.
A forgettable sci-fi romp that does a disservice to the several authors involved in its creation; the joint effort shows off more of their weak point without allowing their strengths to shine through.