Review: The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, by Sofia Samatar

Review: The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, by Sofia Samatar

by Rich Horton

This is a new novella, perhaps 23,000 words, from Sofia Samatar. It should go without saying that anything by Samatar is in the must-read category. This book certainly is. It's strange, dark, depressing but hopeful. Excellent work.

The story centers two characters, one a teenaged boy who has grown up in the Hold of a mining spaceship, the other a professor of the "Older Knowledge" at a school in the more privileged levels of that spaceship. We learn over time that the ship is part of a fleet of ships, in which live what seem to be the survivors of a ruined Earth. They maintain themselves by mining necessary material from what seem to be asteroids. 

The boy has some artistic talent, which brings him to the attention of the professor, who has him freed from the Hold, and from the chain that the people in the Hold always wear. She is the daughter of a man who was also brought up from the Hold to be educated, during a brief period when scholarships were offered to some Hold denizens. The professor has fought to reestablish the scholarships, and the boy is the first attempt at making this work.

The boy has a hard time adjusting to life on this new level. In particular, he misses a friend of his, called the Prophet, who preaches a religion (with Christian echoes) to the people down there. He has dreams, even visions, especially of some of the people in the Hold who were killed due to the negligence and cruelty of the Ship's leaders. The professor, too, has difficulty. She has to spend time helping the boy catch up with his studies, which affects her own work. And it becomes clear that her status in her school, in her whole society, is fraught, due, clearly, to her father's origins. And, too, we realize that she, and the boy, and other people in her orbit, called the Ankleted, are in a sense in chains as well -- an electronic device around their ankles, which helps them communicate with others, turns out to have additional uses.

The book, then, slowly reveals a truly awful and hypocritical society. The professor's treatment by her colleagues, at the same time a satirical depiction of academic politics and a searing depiction of class prejudices, is dreadful. The boy is treated as a sort of pet, though his innocence allows him to overcome this in the way the professor really can't. The story finally turns on the boy's realization of some unexpected abilities, and a reunion with the the Prophet, and an attempt to rescue the Prophet's daughter. The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, is presented as SF, but it's more a sort of parable, and a dark commentary on class and power hierarchies in our world. It's an effective and powerful story.

Review: The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley

Review: The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley

by Rich Horton

The Ministry of Time is Kaliane Bradley's first novel, though she has published a number of short stories, including the winner of the 2022 V. S. Pritchett Prize. As the title hints -- with its resemblance to John Brunner's Society of Time, or Jack Williamson's Legion of Time -- the novel is unabashed SF, and it is a time travel/alternate history story. It seems perhaps in conversation with stories like those mentioned above, or like Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series, or Fritz Leiber's Spiders and Snakes. I don't know if Kaliane Bradley is particularly an SF fan, though apparently she's a fan of Terry Pratchett, but she does use this trope expertly and effectively.

The narrator (who is, perhaps significantly, never named) has just taken a job for the Ministry of Time as a "bridge". Her assignment is to help a person who has been rescued from the past (someone who is known to die, so that taking them to the future won't change history) adjust to the present day. (The novel seems set just slightly in our future -- maybe!) Her assignment is Graham Gore, who was a member of the doomed Franklin Expedition which attempted to find a Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The expedition set out in 1845, and became stuck in the ice in Northern Canada. By 1848 all crewmen of the two ships of the expedition had perished. Gore was "rescued" by the Ministry in 1847.

The other time travelers -- or ex-pats, as they are formally called -- are Thomas Cardingham (died in the Battle of Naseby in 1645), Margaret Kemble (died in the Plague in London in 1665), Anne Spencer (died in the French Revolution in 1793), and Arthur Reginald-Smyth (died in the Battle of the Somme in 1916.) These are all fictional, I think, though Google tells me there was a somewhat noted landscape painter named Arthur Reginald Smith who was a near contemporary of this character (about ten years older), though while the painter did serve in the Great War (in the Artists Rifles Regiment! -- I had not heard of that,) he survived the War, dying in somewhat mysterious circumstances (drowning) in 1934. The time travelers call each other by their dates of recovery -- typically just Forty-five, Sixty-five, Ninety-Three, Forty-Seven, and Sixteen.

The first part of the novel is focused on the narrator introducing Gore to the 21st Century -- and in addition we see the other time travelers and their bridges. Much of this is funny, with Gore's stiff upper lip and general Victorian nature battling to understand this new century. The other two time travelers we get to know best are Margaret and Arthur, who are both gay. Margaret adapts enthusiastically to the freedoms of this time, and particularly enjoys movies, while Arthur struggles with PTSD, and with his (as he realizes) hopeless crush on Gore. Thomas Cardingham is a disagreeable person, particularly sexist and otherwise violently disapproving of 21st Century morés -- I'm not sure if he was a Cavalier or Roundhead, though perhaps the former as he has long hair and, after all, the Royalist side lost decisively at Naseby. And Anne Spencer, rescued from the Terror*, wholly resists adaptation to this future.

We also learn a lot about the narrator -- she's the daughter of a Cambodian woman who barely escaped the Khmer Rouge, and an English man. Her biracial status, and her family history, are significant, and it's significant that her mother, like the time travelers, is an expat. (Bradley, I should note, is also Cambodian-English.) And in short interludes between chapters, we get a direct narrative of the desperate lives of the crew of the Franklin Expedition over the two years and more they are stranded, with some key insights into Gore's character.

But we begin to realize that there are strange things happening, of which the narrator is mostly unaware. There's the picture Gore (an accomplished artist) draws of a weird machine he sees. There's Quentin, the narrator's "handler", who is convinced there is something rotten in the Ministry. And Arthur's bridge, Simellia, a Black woman, is much more radically inclined than the narrator, and she too raises doubts. Time travel seems to have some weird effects, such as the expats suddenly not showing up on scanning equipment. The leader of the project, a sinister-seeming woman named Adela, is constantly changing in appearance. And what about this unusual person, the "Brigadier", who seems to be lurking round the edges?

The plot develops in expected ways -- the narrator and Gore falling in love, most obviously -- but also in some very unexpected ways. If at first it reads like a convenient use of the time travel device to tell a love story, and a story about the experience of expatriates (either in time or space), with some cli fi mixed in, by the end it's all of those things plus a book that gloriously and whole-hearted buys into the strangeness and paradoxes of time travel. There is a wild twist at the end, which I only guessed half of in advance. The love story is beautifully handled. The depiction of near future life is fraught and believable. The examination of the expat experience, the depiction of the horrors of the Franklin Expedition, and the intricate plot are very well done. There are some truly wrenching -- tragic -- happenings, which hit home. It's well written -- Bradley in particular has a way with striking images and metaphors. I did have some quibbles -- time travel stories are always weird when the paradoxes are acknowledged, but some of the effects of this version of time travel seemed contrived to me. Some of the political business (and busyness) towards the end felt flat to me (and a bit "tick the boxes" obligatory.) I'm not sure I quite bought a couple of characters' transformations, and some of the motivations driving the climax didn't quite work. That said, in the end I loved the novel, and the very end is a honest and very moving indeed. The book made me laugh, made me think, made me go wow! -- and brought me to tears.

I've complained a bit about what seems a great many first novels winning major SF awards recently** Having said that, I won't be surprised in The Ministry of Time wins major awards, and as of now it's my choice as best SF novel of 2024 (noting that there are plenty I haven't read.)

*The Terror, of course, is also the name of one of the ships of the Franklin Expedition, so in a sense Gore was also rescued from the Terror, though he was First Lieutenant of the other ship, the Erebus.

**I suppose I should survey the history of the awards and see how often in the past first novels have won Hugos -- the first two Hugos for Best Novel, after all, went to first novels (The Demolished Man and "They'd Rather Be Right"), and other still acclaimed first novels such as "... And Call Me Conrad"/This Immortal, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Neuromancer and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell have won. (OK -- I have taken a look! Only three first novels in the past 11 years have won (Ancillary Justice, A Memory Called Empire, and Some Desperate Glory.) Six first novels in the first 60 years won. So possibly the rate is a bit high recently, but for a relatively small sample size it's really not that strange.)

Review: How to Rule an Empire and Get Away With It, by K. J. Parker

Review: How to Rule an Empire and Get Away With It, by K. J. Parker

by Rich Horton

K. J. Parker's stories are known for their romantic cynicism, their fascination with how things work (mechanically and politically), for depictions of war, for an abiding almost hopeless view of relations between men and women, and for their dark humor. Most of his stories are set in a vaguely Byzantine world, with no pretensions to consistency between stories, sometimes with magic and sometimes without. K. J. Parker, of course, is a pseudonym for Tom Holt, who also write rather lighter comic fantasies under that name, and brilliant historical fiction as by Thomas Holt. I will especially recommend, as I always try to, Thomas Holt's novel The Walled Orchard, first published under the Tom Holt name in two volumes as Goat Song (1989) and The Walled Orchard (1990) -- this is about the Sicilian Expedition, a drastically failed military campaign by Athens in the fifth century BCE. It is, I think, one of the very best historical novels of the past half century, blackly funny, ultimately tragic, and really moving -- about a Greek playwright, his horrible marriage to a woman he loves and hates, and his terrible experiences in Sicily.

A few years ago I read Parker's novel Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City (2019), in which the capitol city of an Empire is besieged by an army of what they think of as barbarians. The novel was in many ways one of Parker's stories about How Things Work, and it brilliantly depicted an engineer leading the effort to foil every effort of the besiegers to breach the walls of the city. All those details were fascinating. And the character story was effective is well, and nicely mordant.

How to Rule an Empire and Get Away With It, from 2020, is the sequel. The siege has settled into a stalemate. Notker, our narrator, is an actor, impressionist, and playwright. He's also the son of a gang enforcer -- the City has two primary gangs, or Themes, the Blue and the Green, bitter rivals. And the city's leader, Lysimachus, a man regarded as a hero for saving the city (though we all know the real hero was the engineer in Sixteen Ways) has been killed. Mention is made of some popular plays, with names like The Prisoner of Beloisia and The Man in the Bronze Mask. Not to mention that one of Notker's most popular impressions was of Lysimachus. Any reader can see where this is going. 

So, yes, Notker is maneuvered into assuming Lysimachus' position, and impersonating him. In the process he must get himself a mistress, to keep up appearances, especially as Lysimachus' sexuality was in doubt ... and he chooses Hodda, an actress and impresario with whom he is in love, though she is basically indifferent to him, despite them having a previous relationship. (There's an echo here of The Walled Orchard, with a playwright involved in an unsuccessful relationship.)

This sets up the situation for the rest of the novel -- Notker/Lysimachus takes control, and eventually truly takes the reins, leading several efforts to keep the invaders at bay, and in the process unifying the Blue and Green gangs, and making other improvements in the City's organization, as well as harrying the enemy. Plague threatens as well. Meanwhile Hodda desperately wants them to escape to safety, and Notker assures her that that's the plan, but only when it's feasible. There is some of Parker's beloved engineering, mostly involving attempts to stop the besiegers from breaking through a seam of granite and getting to the city walls to undermine them. It's clear Notker -- now crowned Emperor Lysimachus II -- is tempted by power, but he realizes that power leads to abuse of power and atrocities. And he comes up with a plan to sort of have his cake and eat it too ...

It's enjoyable enough, but nowhere near Parker at his best. The engineering bits are OK but not as absorbing as he can be. The relationship between Notker and Hodda just doesn't have the emotional heft some of the other doomed quasi-romances in Parker's novels attain. The darkly comic tone is well maintained, but it's not as funny as he can be. The ending falls just a tad flat, though as this is a middle novel of a trilogy that's not entirely unusual. (The third novel, A Practical Guide to Conquering the World, appeared in 2022.)

Review: Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters; and Seymour, an Introduction, by J. D. Salinger

Review: Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters; and Seymour, an Introduction, by J. D. Salinger

by Rich Horton

I read J. D. Salinger's most famous novel -- only novel, really -- The Catcher in the Rye, back in high school -- the right time. I liked it, and at more or less the same time, I read Nine Stories, and I thought that was pretty good too. But I didn't read his third book, Franny and Zooey, until just a few years ago. I thought that book was fine but not brilliant. I kind of knew I'd eventually read his only other book -- the one at hand -- though I'd gathered the impression that his fiction was somewhat linearly declining in quality. So when I found a copy of RH&S (as I'll abbreviate it) for a dollar at an estate sale, I figure, why not?

Like Franny and Zooey, this book comprises a shorter story plus a novella or short novel. In this instance, "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" is the shorter one, at some 22,000 words; while "Seymour, an Introduction" is the longer, some 29,000 words. The stories appeared first in the New Yorker, in 1955 and 1959, respectively. (All of Salinger's work except for The Catcher in the Rye appeared there after "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" in 1948 -- the New Yorker gave him a contract in which they had right of first refusal for any fiction -- for a price, I assume.) Both these books, plus three of the stories in Nine Stories ("A Perfect Day for Bananafish", "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut", and "Down at the Dinghy") concern the Glass family -- seven children (two of them dead) of two vaudevillians. Salinger's last published story, "Hapworth 16, 1924", which occupied nearly the entirety of the New Yorker for June 19, 1965, is also about the Glasses, and by repute, Salinger wrote additional stories and novels about them after he stopped publishing.

This is, I think it's fair to say, a problem. Salinger's obsession, the Glass family, is wearing. In particular, the eldest child, Seymour, becomes an improbable object of devotion -- an absurdly precocious boy, a saint, really. And the last two published stories are similarly long pieces curated (or written) by the second Glass child, Buddy, but wholly about Seymour. The thing is, Seymour committed suicide in the very first, and best, Glass story, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish". Salinger's development of the Glass mythos ended up requiring his stand-in, Buddy, to claim, in "Seymour, an Introduction", that in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" (supposedly, in this context, written by Buddy) was not really about Seymour but about Buddy. 

(A couple words about the titles of these stories and the book -- the proper punctuation is not clear. I have rendered the titles in the form I think most sensible.)

So, the stories themselves. "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters", is about Seymour's wedding day, in 1942. It is told by Buddy, two years Seymour's junior. For reasons -- wartime reasons, mostly -- Buddy is the only Glass who can make it to the wedding, though he had to get leave from his army camp to do so. But the wedding doesn't come off -- Seymour has seemingly left Muriel, his fiancée, at the altar. Buddy ends up in a car with members of the bride's family, heading to what will be a gloomy quasi-reception. The story follows Buddy's endurance of the protests of the Matron of Honor and her husband, and a certain Mrs. Silsburn, about the caddish behavior of Seymour. His only ally is a dwarfish elderly deaf-mute. The drive is interrupted by a parade, and in the end Buddy invites them all to his and Seymour's nearby apartment (abandoned to their sister Boo-Boo when they join the military), and makes them drinks while finding Seymour's diary. It turns out that Seymour funked the wedding because he was "too happy" -- and that he and Muriel ended up eloping. 

This is actually a decent, if overlong, story. Salinger's eye (and ear) for amusing details is fully present. The story is more about Buddy than about Seymour, which is fine. It's a nice presentation of a fraught wedding at a difficult time -- the early months of America's entry into the Second World War. (Salinger served on the European front, was there on D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge, was present at Dachau shortly after its liberation, and was cleary and understandably severely affected by this.) The title, by the way, is from a fragment of Sappho: "Raise high the roof beam, carpenters. Like Ares comes the bridegroom, taller far than a tall man."

"Seymour, an Introduction" is Buddy's attempt, in 1959, to describe his beloved elder brother to the world, on the occasion of the prospective publication of Seymour's poems. (Seymour, besides being remarkably talented at everything else except for some sports at which he is very bad but in a very special way, is supposed to be a great poet -- in Buddy's estimation, clearly the greatest poet of the 20th Century, working in a form called "double haiku" -- sometimes in Japanese, sometimes in English, presumably occasionally in Latin or Sanskrit or Proto-Indo-European.) This introduction is incredibly discursive, and is as much about Buddy as it is about Seymour. We learn a fair amount about their shared childhood, and a lot about Buddy's state of mind and health as he is writing this. (He is a teacher at a women's college in far upstate New York.) And we do learn about Seymour. Not much about his poems, which are never quoted, just described, but a lot about his physiognomy, and about his early life with Buddy. 

The thing is, there is some good stuff here. But it's to a great extent buried in the endless, self-indulgent, divagations; and it's to a great extent weakened by the glorification and sanctification of Seymour. (Yes, I suppose his name is meaningful too!) The Seymour we saw in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" is an affecting character -- clearly damaged by his experience in a terrible war, clearly unhappy in his marriage (though I think the portrayal of Muriel, in retrospect, seems unfair.) The later revisionist approach to his life and fate is, well -- self-indulgent. I understand that "Hapworth 16, 1924" is mostly a long letter from the seven year old Seymour, written at camp, in which we learn of his lust for a much older married woman, and of his admiration for the likes of Anna Karenina. Hmmmm. 

(I was intrigued to see references to Betsey Trotwood and the donkeys, and to Anna Karenina's being painted in Italy, in this story -- references that would have meant nothing to me had I not read both David Copperfield and Anna K in the past year or so.)

So -- a lesser story in this case. Still, I'm happy enough to have read this book. I don't know that I'll attempt "Hapworth 16, 1924", though I guess I'll get to it sooner or later, mostly later. And I must confess I have little optimism about the supposedly voluminous material Salinger left behind at his death -- surely it means something that his heirs have not seen fit to publish it.

Resurrected Review: The Cutting Edge, by Penelope Gilliatt

I decided for eccentric reasons -- and because the latest novel I read (The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley) deserves a more thoughtful treatment -- to post a very short review I did of a fairly obscure novel, that I read a couple decades ago. I chose this novel because Joachim Boaz just acquired Penelope Gilliatt's SF novel, One by One. (I had not known she'd written any SF!)

Resurrected Review: The Cutting Edge, by Penelope Gilliatt

by Rich Horton

Penelope Gilliatt was an English novelist, short story writer and screenwriter (Sunday Bloody Sunday) who was also well known at the film critic for the New Yorker whose columns alternated with those of Pauline Kael. She was married to the famous playwright John Osborne. I got her 1979 novel The Cutting Edge for a quarter when my local library deaccessioned it -- I bought it because I recalled her name from the New Yorker, and because it looked interesting, and because how wrong can you go for a quarter?

And in fact it is a pretty enjoyable novel. It's the story of two eccentric sons of an eccentric English professor. The elder son is eventually named Peregrine, the younger Benedick (I say eventually because the professor initially called them Brother A and Brother B). They grow up, and Benedick gets married, and for a while live together in the ancestral house, along with Benedick's wife, and the Professor, and his second wife, and the boy's half-brothers, and their nurse ... then Benedick's wife, Joanna, leaves him. Which precipitates the main action of the novel.

The two end up in Istanbul. Peregrine is a writer and a Benedick a musician, but neither makes much money. When Peregrine gets in trouble for an affair with a 14 year old, he's off to Italy and then Paris, meanwhile becoming somewhat famous in England for his criticisms of his country, which come apparently from an old-fashioned (as in Samuel Johnson old-fashioned) Tory sensibility. Meanwhile Benedick is writing music with some success, missing his wife, and missing his brother even more perhaps. A series of brittlely funny short chapters detail their, er, peregrinations, leading inevitably to Joanna showing up in Paris and shacking up with Peregrine.

And that's pretty much it. It's a short novel (perhaps 40,000 words) and a fast read, and funny in rather brittle fashion (as I said). It's populated by briefly and effectively sketched eccentrics who wander into and out of the brothers' life. The whole thing is nice if minor work.

Review: A Mourning Coat, by Alex Jeffers

Review: A Mourning Coat, by Alex Jeffers

by Rich Horton

Alex Jeffers first came to my attention wtih two stories in the Robert Silverberg/Karen Haber anthology Universe 2, from 1992: "(from) The Bridge", and "The Fire, The Fire". I didn't realize it then, but I had seen stories from him more than a decade earlier, beginning with "Mask", from New Dimensions 6, edited by Silverberg, through "The Celebrants", from Universe 12, edited by Silverberg with Marta Randall. There's a reason I didn't make that connection -- these stories were published as by Donnan Call Jeffers, Jr. (Alex's birth name) and Peter Santiago C. Indeed, Jeffers' first 8 SF stories were published in anthologies edited by Robert Silverberg, which ought to remind us that Silverberg's contribution to the field as editor, not just writer, has been profound. (Though to be sure Silverberg's co-editors, Randall and Haber, deserve credit too.) 

But this isn't about Robert Silverberg! It's about Alex Jeffers. I loved those stories in Universe, and his name stuck with me, and I was delighted when I saw more stories from him some 15 years later: "Firooz and his Brother" in F&SF in 2008 (and reprinted in my Best of the Year anthology) and "Jannicke's Cat" in M-Brane in 2009. Christopher Fletcher, editor and publisher of M-Brane (and a fellow St. Louisan) also published a short novel by Jeffers in 2011, The New People. (Which I reviewed here.) Jeffers has also published two non-fantastical novels, Safe as Houses (1995) and Do You Remember Tulum (2009), as well as a couple more novels, Deprivation; or, Benedetto furioso: An Oneiromancy (2013) and That Door is a Mischief (2014), as well as a Lambda Award winning erotic novella, The Padisah's Son and the Fox (1996, expanded 2013). And as to the name -- yes, Alex is the grandson of the great American poet Robinson Jeffers.

Jeffers has continued to publish delightful stories, including some set in a fantastical world called Kandadal's World. I reprinted one of these ("The Tale of the Ive-Ojan-Akhar’s Death") in my Best of the Year volume. A Mourning Coat is likewise set in that world. (It's a world about which you can say "in" not "on".)

Therre, the narrator, is mourning his father's death. He had been his caretaker for five years, as his father descended into a cranky senility. And so his feelings are complicated -- this made his life terribly difficult (for one thing he broke up with his long time lover to devote his full attention to his Dada.) And his family history was tricky too -- his father, a famous actor, moved from the mainland, Kyrland, to the large island Yf for his career, taking Therre with him, but abandoning Therre's mother and older sister, who wished to stay home. Therre has grown up to be a highly respected costume designer for the movies, and that career, too, has been put on hold as he cares for his Dada. But for all that, Therre truly loved his father.

There are to be two ceremonies -- a private one for Therre and close friends, and a more public one for his father's industry connections. Therre makes a special, rather flamboyant, mourning coat for these ceremonies. And, somewhat unexpectedly, this creates a sensation -- his career as a designer is definitely back on. But is this what he wants?

There are significant personal elements -- his ex-lover, now married, accompanies him to the private ceremony, and though their sexual relationship is not on anymore, they can still be friends -- and she, a lawyer, will represent him in a case brought by his father's former lover, contesting the will. Add to that a mild rekindling of Therre's relationship with his sister, and most importantly, the prospect of a new lover -- an actor he had worked with on an eventually abortive film project before his father's illness. 

In many ways, recounting this plot, it seems like the stakes here are small. And perhaps they are -- but then how small are the stakes when we are mourning a parent? or starting a new relationship? No, Therre's choices aren't going to change the world -- but they will change his life in ways that matter. And recovering from grief is also emotionally vital to anyone -- and Jeffers' depiction of Therre's grief is beautiful and convincing. 

I haven't discussed the prose, which is graceful and beautiful. Nor have I discussed the context -- this world, and the magic, the gods, which are de-emphasized here because Yf has no gods -- but magic still plays a significant role here. And we see too the history -- recounted in part by describing movie projects for Therre and his father. There is a real sense of reality, of deep time, of history as it is remembered. This is truly a lovely story, and I hope it gets the attention it deserves.

I'll add, quickly, details of the publication. This edition is from dave ring's imprint Neon Hemlock. It's a pretty book, with nice cover (by Jeff Kristian) and interior illustrations (by Matthew Spencer.) It's available at www.neonhemlock.com. 

Review: Cold Welcome, by Elizabeth Moon

Review: Cold Welcome, by Elizabeth Moon

by Rich Horton

I really enjoyed Elizabeth Moon's Aunts in Space*, er, Familias Regnant Space Opera series, 7 books published between 1993 and 2000; and I also loved her Vatta's War books, five more Mil SF/Space Opera stories published from 2003 to 2008. (Ky Vatta's universe is not the same as that of Heris Serrano and Esmay Suiza, but it does feature one formidable (Great) Aunt.) So I was quite glad, back in 2017, to see that she was publishing sequels to the Vatta's War books -- Cold Welcome in 2017 and Into the Fire in 2018. I didn't read the books right away -- too much other stuff on my plate -- but my wife (not an SF reader) did tackle Cold Welcome. And now I finally have gotten around to it.

Ky Vatta, after the events of the Vatta's War books, has been named the Admiral of the Space Defense Force, a multi-planet peacekeeping organization. And now she is returning to her home planet, Slotter Key, for some ceremonial reasons, and also to clean up the ownership status of the Vatta family business. Her redoubtable great aunt Grace is the Rector of Defense for Slotter Key, her cousin Stella is the primary leader of the Vatta businesses, though she's now based on another planet (Cascadia), her sometime lover Rafe, a criminal who has gone more or less straight as the head of ISC, is also off planet. And pretty much as soon as she enters Slotter Key's atmosphere, her shuttle is shot down over the far southern seas of the planet, as winter approaches.

Ky and the 20 or so survivors manage to survive ditching into the ocean, and to get into a couple of rafts. Ky, with the able help of a veteran Master Sergeant Marek, and with the less able presence of her Cascadian personal assistant Jen Bentik, organizes things to eventually bring them to shore on the deserted continent of Miksland, abandoned as a terraforming failure. Her job is to find a way to survive for a few months until the weather makes it possible for a rescue mission to get to them; and at the same time chivvy the other survivors into becoming a disciplined team, and dealing with the malcontents and a potential traitor.

Meanwhile Grace Vatta and Stella and Rafe and other mobilize to deal with making sure a rescue effort is mounted, to find out who is responsible for the attack on the shuttle, and to give what help is possible to Ky, which is precious little except for one bit of magic secret tech that Ky and Rafe share. (This tech was introduced in the previous series.) There are bad guys on Slotter Key, and on other planets. There is political maneuvering, such as people who want Ky declared dead so they can assume her powerful position. And there are some mysteries -- the continent of Miksland isn't quite what it seems, and there are unexamined secrets about the history of Slotter Key, such as who terraformed it and why and where are they, that only now start to come to light. 

The novel is just lots of fun. Elizabeth Moon is a first rate adventure writer, and I found it gripping throughout. She also makes the political intrigues, well, intriguing. The bad guys, mind you, are really evil, to the extent we see them. And Ky has some superpowers (or it comes off that way) and a lot of luck. But that comes with the territory for this sort of book. I also found the ending just a bit disappointing, though I think this is largely because room was being made for the sequel. In particular, some of the new questions the books raises -- particularly the mystery of the terraformers -- are dangled in front of us but never addressed. That will come later in the series, I trust! 

*Full credit should be given to James Davis Nicoll for coining the term "Aunts in Space".