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Series Business: The Xenowealth Books
August 1, 2008

Quick administrative note: Genreville now has an RSS feed!

I've been reading a lot of series recently, either refreshing my memory of old favorites so I can catch up with new installments or picking up more recent books that have gotten a lot of good press or been recommended by friends. I love series, and it occurred to me that I rarely get to review or discuss a series as a whole. Hence Series Business, which I'm currently planning to run every other Friday. This is necessarily going to involve some spoilers, at least for earlier books, so reader beware. I'll try to avoid discussing trilogies and other series with defined end points until all the pieces are in place; much as I would love to write about Daniel Abraham's Long Price Quartet, it would probably be best to wait until the fourth book is available. For never-ending adventure series, on the other hand, all bets are off.

A couple of months ago we got in galleys for Tobias S. Buckell's Sly Mongoose (Tor, August 2008), the third novel featuring rough-and-tough space mercenary Pepper. I was intrigued by the bits I read while fact-checking the review--one of the perks of this job--and had heard a lot about Buckell's work, so I snagged copies of Crystal Rain (Tor, February 2006) and Ragamuffin (Tor, June 2007) and read all three in quick succession. This is definitely a series of the never-ending adventure type; indeed, Buckell seems reluctant to describe the books as a series, or as part of a series, at all. I had to email him directly to find out that "the Xenowealth books" is his preferred collective descriptor.

Crystal Rain takes place entirely on or around the planet Nanagada, where Caribbean and Aztec colony cultures are driven to battle by aliens whom they worship as gods. Ragamuffin follows it directly in time but moves out into the rest of the universe, hopping from planet to ship to space station with brisk efficiency as the alien Satrapy, ruler of most of the human colony worlds, takes an interest in affairs on and around Nanagada. Sly Mongoose skips ahead fifty years and over to Chilo, a Venus-like planet inhabited by descendents of Nanagada's Aztec populace and under attack by people who have been turned into telepathic zombies. It's not particularly spoiling anything to say that in all three stories, Pepper shows up just when he's needed and sets about saving the world with brisk efficiency and heavy sarcasm, inspiring awe, fear, and annoyance in the people and aliens he encounters.

It's interesting to watch Buckell try different things in each book. Crystal Rain and Ragamuffin have numerous POV characters, while Sly Mongoose is almost entirely from Pepper's perspective. At the start of Crystal Rain, Pepper seems cold-eyed and cold-hearted, but by the end of Sly Mongoose it's clear that he's mired in depression, going on with life because he can't quite get away from his hardwired survival instinct. The shift back to planetside in Sly Mongoose makes the space chase of Ragamuffin feel perhaps more experimental and tentative than it otherwise would; there's a bit of spaceship action in Sly Mongoose, but on the whole one gets the sense that Buckell decided the universe was getting a little too big and needed to be shrunk down some.

Buckell includes multiple major female characters, many of whom have real power and steer the story--most notably prime minister Dihana in Crystal Rain, pilot and human time bomb Nashara and young colonist Kara in Ragamuffin, cyborg emissary Katerina and behind-the-scenes power player Itotia in Sly Mongoose--but they all seem cut from the same cloth: forced into difficult decisions by unpleasant circumstances, absolutely devoted to the people who depend on them, grimly doing the right thing even if it kills them. Of course, many of the men are the same, likewise hardened by seemingly endless war and struggles to survive in a universe where humanity is emphatically near the bottom of the food chain and all the aliens are trying to keep it there. The aliens themselves seem almost entirely sexless except when a ship full of embryonic nasties is needed as a plot point; they may be too highly evolved to need such distinctions, or this perception might just be from the depressing human tendency to think all foreigners look the same, though I suspect I'm reading in that subtext. Buckell shies well and sensibly away from turning human/alien interaction into any sort of metaphor for race relations, focusing on human culture clash instead.

I very much enjoyed reading these and would recommend them to anyone who enjoys space opera but wants to get away from some of the cliches of the genre. Buckell has a weakness for last-minute rescues, guns that never jam or miss, and outrageous plans that the heroes just barely manage to pull off, but he's not shy about killing major characters (including young ones), his human cultures are beautifully drawn, the older technology has a lovely spit-and-baling-wire feel to it, and the characters vary in age and experience as well as race and background. He also throws in some great nifty ideas, most notably the zombie Swarm in Sly Mongoose and the zero-gee gun battle in Ragamuffin. Less spectacularly, he introduces the notion of lamina, a virtual layer draped over the world that's like having Google in your contact lenses--look at something and instantly get information about it--and then goes out of his way to note its drawbacks and create a major character who can't use it. I don't know whether this is an intentional commentary on modern information culture, but it certainly works well that way.

Few of the characters really get a chance to develop, and those who do tend to die or simply not appear in later books. They're intriguing enough in cross-section, but I think Buckell could stretch himself a little bit there. I'm not sure how I feel about suicidal depression and PTSD as Pepper's defining character flaws--as generations of teenagers have discovered, being miserable doesn't make you more interesting--and they get in the way of understanding his motivations, but they contrast well with his superhuman physical and mental abilities. When you're that strong and capable, the only person who can stop you is you. It will be interesting to see whether Buckell writes more books in this universe, and if so, whether readers will get to learn more about Pepper's inner workings. In the meantime, there's plenty of gosh-wow-whiz-bang to enjoy in his adventures.

Some of the other series I've read lately include Jim Butcher's Dresden Files, Naomi Novik's Temeraire books, Elizabeth Bear's Promethean Age quartet, and Terry Pratchett's Discworld series (yes, I'm reading all of the Discworld books, from the beginning; fortunately they go at about the rate of a book a day, but that's still three weeks of reading). I could also include Robert Charles Wilson's Spin and Axis and Catherynne M. Valente's Orphan's Tales if you consider a duology to be a subtype of series rather than its own thing, though the Valente is arguably a quartet in two volumes. Once I'm done drowning in Pratchett, I'll probably go for Hal Duncan's Book of All Hours, another duology, and then catch up on Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos tales. On the unfinished series front, I'm waiting impatiently for the final Long Price book, C.L. Wilson's fourth Tairen Soul fantasy romance, and the long-delayed next volume in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. What series have you read lately? What would you recommend?

Posted by Rose Fox on August 1, 2008 | Comments (7)