I Read Books: Evening's Empires

 

Evening’s Empires

After the events of In The Mouth Of The Whale, back in the solar system, the Bright Moment occurred; a memory of fabled geneticist wizard Sri Owen-Hong of a man on a bicycle. The solar system itself is in somewhat of a fractured state; the True Empire fell after attacking a seraph (post-human intelligence) in orbit around Saturn. The seraphs retaliated by blocking sunlight to the Earth, triggering ecological devastation (for the second time in the sequence; see The Quiet War).

None of this is directly relevant at the start; Hari the youngest son of a ship’s captain has found himself marooned on an asteroid after raiders took over the family ship. They were looking for Dr Gagarian, a tick-tock (cyborg) philosopher (scientist) who was studying the Bright Moment aboard ship. Hari escapes with Dr Gagarian’s head and its secrets and goes on a long tour around various habitats and other locations in the solar system, trying to find out who attacked the ship, why, and if they’ll ransom it and his family back to him. Things inevitably get complicated, picking up various companions along the way, and seeing how the solar system is getting on in the aftermath of the True Empire (sometimes poorly, sometimes just getting by, always weirdly).

Entertainingly the sections of the book are named after classic SF stories and books, with at least one homage to a very famous story. Hari’s problems, quite apart from the fact his family has been captured by pirates (“dacoits” or “reivers” as they suggest, though in fact the perpetrators are not quite either of those as they understand them), are constantly being caught up in local concerns or the interests of other characters, bogged down in local laws, customs and economics. Which is the nature of the solar system at this time, and why the data about the Bright Moment that Dr Gagarian was working on might be valuable – might even transform the society(s) scattered through space.

Read This: Clever, imaginative space opera
Don’t Read This: Doesn’t have answers, keeps getting distracted