A review by lezreadalot
The Vela: The Complete Season 1 by Becky Chambers, Rivers Solomon, Yoon Ha Lee, S.L. Huang

3.0

Maybe someday a poet would write a tragedy about this day. In it, she would be a villain.

3.5 stars. I have mixed feelings about this book, but most of those feelings are good? As it often is whenever I come back to scifi after a long break from it, this reminded me powerfully of all of the things I love about the genre; the space opera, the worldbuilding and all the potential in it, and this in particular had so many meaningful real world parallels that I adored. My mind was whirring all while reading this, and I was never not fully engaged.

I actually went in pretty much blind, which I found really enjoyable, though not everyone would. The broad stroke are: the story takes place in a system on the brink of death. Years of mining have taken a toll on the sun, and it's about 100 years away from dying. The planets on the outer rings are suffering, literally freezing to death, while the planets on the inners rings who are responsible for the mining continue to profit from it. The situation has created a refugee crisis, with thousands upon thousands fleeing the dying worlds, and most of the inner worlds being ambivalent or downright hostile to them. The main character, Asala, is a refugee, having been sent off world by her family more than 30 years ago, and she's eked out a life as a soldier/sniper in the inner rings.

The plot starts with the micro and grows in scale to encompass the whole system in fascinating and surprising ways. It's been a while since I've read deeply involved scifi like this, but the worldbuilding and characters didn't take very long for me to grasp at all. It's just really great to take these huge, universe-altering plots and put them in the hands of normal people, and see how things spin out from there. It worked really well in the beginning, where I just devoured all the political workings, all the gradual reveals. Coming down to the end, as the scope of everything just got bigger and bigger, it started to feel like things are were happening out of control, and all the big reveals and revelations were coming too fast; so fast they stopped really having an impact, no matter how shocking they were. The authors wanted to do a lot, and near the end, the narrative started suffering for it imo.

Speaking of the authors! This was really masterfully written and crafted by all of them; I've only ever read Solomon before this, but they're all obviously juggernauts of scifi and they know what they're doing. This was serialised; 10 episodes in all, shared up amongst the four writers. I thought that each writer would be handling a different set of characters, but that wasn't the case. Asala was the main POV (along with a few important secondary POVs) and they all wrote her. This didn't work super well for me? The first episode was written by Huang, and I absolutely loved it, and loved Asala as written by her. And since that was my first experience with Asala, every other writer's interpretation of her felt... slightly off? Not by much, not anything that's terribly noticeable, but I did notice, and it made the story feel a bit disjointed. Unavoidable, with a work that's been serialised like this, but I thought I'd mention it, as it did curb my enjoyment some.

But there is undoubtedly a LOT to enjoy here. I was super impressed with all the culture here; all the stories and nuances about the different worlds. The was an emphasis of written and oral history as told by plays and poetry that reminded me very favourably of A Memory Called Empire. I really loved our main characters, especially Niko; they were so freaking brave, and I understood every decision they made, even if I didn't always agree. This shines a spotlight on humanity at its worst, but also its finest. And the ways authors do that through scifi is always very rewarding to me.

I definitely enjoyed this a lot, even if that enjoyment waned coming down to the very end. I don't know if I'll read the next season, but it's definitely intriguing enough for me to want to give it a try.

Content warnings:
Spoilerdeath, murder, injury, gore, genocide


☆ Review copy provided via NetGalley.