a review by Rich Horton
Today is Elizabeth Moon's birthday, so I've resurrected a review I wrote a long time ago of the first of her Kylara Vatta novels. I'm a big fan of both of Moon's long Military SF series -- the earlier series, sometimes called the Heris Serrano books, but more amusingly, in James Nicoll's coinage, the "Aunts in Space" books; and the later Kylara Vatta series. Both series are bifurcated, with an initial sequence of a few novels, followed fairly directly by a new but related sequence. I'm posting this review because it's of the first novel, but I should add that this wasn't my favorite novel in the Vatta's War sequence -- it got better as it went along.
Trading in Danger was Elizabeth Moon's second novel for Del Rey after leaving Baen. The Speed of Dark came first. It was a near future look at an autistic man and a potential treatment for autism. Trading in Danger was a return to military SF, with an overtly "commercial" aspect, as it is about a commercial shipping company.This was the first volume of a new series called Vatta's War. As such it may be regarded as primarily an introduction to a character and setting, and looked at that way it works OK. But it's a bit disappointing on its own. (After the Vatta's War books, Moon recently began a new "subseries" called Vatta's Peace.)
Kylara Vatta is a 21 year old nearly read to graduate from her planet's Space Academy, when she is summarily dismissed for having helped a fellow cadet who ended up embarrassing the Academy. Fortunately she is the daughter of the CFO of a very respected family-owned space transport company, Vatta Transport, Ltd, and she has a position to return to. Despite her youth, she is immediately assigned a Captaincy in Vatta organization, and she is given an old ship, with orders to take it on one last shipment and then to bring it to a salvage yard and scrap it. This is seen as a presumably routine first assignment.
But on the way she sees an opportunity to make some money for the company -- possibly enough to refurbish the ship and keep it for herself. She agrees to pick up a shipment of agricultural equipment and take it to a fairly new colony planet. Unfortunately, the place she goes to get the equipment turns out to be on the brink of civil war, and on top of that her old ship finally breaks down and she is stranded without FTL capability. And then one side in the war takes the almost unprecedented step of destroying the ansibles, leaving her (and the entire system) out of contact with the rest of the Galaxy. Her ship is unarmed, so she is forced to cooperate with mercenaries who demand that she intern some personnel from other ships the mercenaries have captured. Before long she is facing mutiny, a further damaged ship, starvation, and eventually the humiliating presence of a senior Vatta captain.
As I said, I like Moon's military SF, and I tend to fall for her female heroes, and this book is no exception that way. I liked Ky and will keep reading her series. But this book itself is unsatisfying in several ways. Some of it is not convincing -- for instance her convenient ouster from the Academy just didn't make much sense to me. (And the reaction of her boyfriend ... well, I won't say, but I didn't believe it, either. Though it's a very minor point.) Furthermore, there are annoying loose ends, such as what is really going on in the war she gets embroiled in, and particularly, why did a certain group blow up the ansibles?: they are never given a plausible reason to have done so (it is stated to always backfire, and it certainly seems to do so in this case). The overall action is just a bit flat. I've often criticized Moon's tendency to have overly sneering, evull, villains: that's mostly not the case here, which on the face of it is good, but which also reflects a certain lack of a coherent conflict in the book.
[I add again, the the series gained a perfectly coherent conflict in subsequent books, and I ended up enjoying it quite a bit.]
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