OH BOY LET'S TALK ABOUT BOOKS
I recently made my way through a pair of space opera-flavored trilogies, one was okay and the other was incredible.
First, The Bobiverse, which is:
We Are Legion (We Are Bob)
For We Are Many
All These Worlds
All by Dennis E. Taylor.
The premise for The Bobiverse is great: A normal person, killed in a car accident in 2016, wakes up in the mid-distant future to discover his brain has been scanned into a computer, and that his new job is to be a self-replicating von Neumann probe, searching the galaxy for new life, new civiliations, and new challenges. The only problem is that he's also woken into a horrifyingly believable political nightmare, and humanity atom-bombs itself into certain doom by chapter 12. The series has several interesting conceits - copies of the titular Bob all develop their own personalities and individual quirks, which is generally reflected well in the prose (and marvelously performed by Ray Porter, the audiobook narrator). The Bobs are all basically stable and basically decent people, at least by their own metrics, and what conflict exists between them is generally handled well.
The story falls down in its failure to examine many of the subjects it brings in any particular detail (in particular, the idea of personal immortality) and a general lack of narrative focus. There is some fairly unpleasant handling of a romantic relationship between a Bob and a (at the time) flesh-and-blood human, and I cared neither for the arc of those characters or the ultimate resolution. The final book in the trilogy wanders far too much, and the series' principal and concrete antagonist is given much less time in the story than they deserve, which is something that makes their ultimate threat somewhat abstract.
Really, this is a story that wants to exist in a crossroads between The Martian and Old Man's War, and I would say it doesn't quite get there. There are Big Ideas, but they are left unexplored. There's a Big Bad, but the interactions with them are perfunctory, and the lasting impact poorly examined. There are moments of emotional resonance, but few landed where they were supposed to, and one in particular made me angry rather than satisfied. Still, for all that, the story does move quickly, the prose is conversational, often funny, and deeply accessible. If you like stories where the author "did the math," Taylor does manage that and occasionally in spectacular fashion. It wasn't bad, but it could have been so much better.
----
Next, The Imperial Radch, which includes:
Ancillary Justice
Ancillary Sword
Ancillary Mercy
All by Ann Leckie.
The Imperial Radch series is one where all of the trappings of space opera are present, but are turned, gently, on their ear. There is a vast empire, and it's not very nice, but our protagonist used to be one of its soldiers. But they aren't leading a rebellion, or at least, they don't set out to. Breq, the last surviving fragment of an intelligence once inhabiting the warship Justice of Toren, begins her story with a singular and familiar purpose: vengeance. For herself, for everything she was, for everything she might have been, for everything she was forced to be.
There are secrets Breq knows that are only revealed to the reader slowly; her ambitions and machinations are opaque until exactly the moment that they aren't, and the world she inhabits is shockingly rich. There are no clean, clear answers in this story, no objective good defeating objective evil. You are sympathetic to Breq, of course, but she is messy, complicated, existing in a universe that feels tarnished and alive and real in a way that feels effortless and complete. Breq's evolution from where she begins the story is subtle and profound. The scope of the story steadily expands, a vast and intricate mechanism that once wound up, scythes through the setting in a way that at first seems surprising, and on reflection, is the only way the story could have gone.
I loved this series, virtually without qualification. It is rich and dense, but without a Stephenson-style self-aggrandizement that requires you to sit through info-dumps. The story is driving and complex with emotional resonance, self-reflection, and examination of some very Big Ideas. The world has the constant feeling that Leckie knows much more about it than she's putting down on the page, and those splashes of detail lend vitality and constant excitement to the setting, which exists as both part of and in service of the narrative.
The series also has hive-mind sex, a schizophrenic Emperor whose mind is made of hundreds of clones of themselves, extensive asides about tea (and why it's important to have a good set of dishes), and a scene with Breq literally standing on the hull of her sentient starship while firing a handgun at warships coming to kill her, because she knows something they don't. It's a story that spans a few years and millenia, with ghost stories that involve entire starships, linguistics jokes, and a protagonist who will terrify you while you're rooting for her success. It feels fantastical and modern, prescient and contemporary. This is different from Bujold, and I would argue better (although I adore her writing), more ambitious than Scalzi, and more thoughtful than Heinlein or Niven or Pournelle ever could have been. I'll say it again: I loved this series.
