sherwoodreads 's review for:

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

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As I pointed out in a Goodreads review of Elizabeth Bear’s new space opera, Ancestral Night, space opera is back, and at least in the hands of some female writers, it is not even remotely retrogressive in the ways that were standard some thirty years ago.

Four authors banded together to create the new Serial Box Serial The Vela

For me to get hooked, space opera has to hit at least some of the following elements:

Larger than life characters with interesting explorations of gender and identity

The Vela scores pretty high here.

There has clearly been a conscious effort to offer a diverse cast of characters. Most of the speaking parts, protagonists, antagonists, and very complex characters who don’t plump squarely in either camp, the narrative voice identifies as female. A few don’t have gender sepecified (which is signified by “they/them” which unfortunately I have trouble reading as not-plural, but that seems to be the trend rather than various non-standard pronouns that have been floated, such as zir, etc)

What I liked is that the characters’ gender is not made an Issue, and thus doesn’t get in the way of a cracking good story that starts with a bang and keeps running. It just is a part of a world that feels lived-in, with its cultural islands and outlooks, that is doomed.

Asala, who is one of our main pair, is a tough fighter as well as a campaigner: the story opens with her lying on a rooftop with her sniper rifle, having turned off her hearing aid as she functions better as a sniper in silence.

Niko, our secondary character, is a young hacker, offspring of President Ekrem, a career politician with all that implies. Niko is sometimes like a pup, and sometimes seems to want you to believe that puppy-like, adorable fumbling brightness. Niko gets the “they/them” that sometimes distracted old me into rereading sentences to realize it was one person, not a mob doing the action.

Asala and Niko leave to find a refugee ship that has somehow disappeared. . . bringing me to:

Interesting space ships that go beyond sprockets and rockets

The space ships are well thought out, but the focus is on a star system whose sun is dying after being basically used up by the rich inner planets. Everyone is trying to flee to the warmer inner planets before the cold kills them.

And we all know how well desperate immigrants are treated by the richer denizens. The Vela vanished, and both Asala and Niko care what happened to those refugees. President Ekrem, who secretly sent them, also cares, but not for the same reasons.

Emotional complexity

This is where my admiration really set in: four writers working together blended their styles and storytelling well enough to furnish complex characters as the story keeps widening out in . . .

Layered or polysemous surprises

Oh yeah. Right around the time we start catching up with The Vela the story takes yet another turn, into the seriously cool.

Serial Box’s 2019 is off to a terrific start with this serial.

Review copy provided by Serial Box.