Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
Far Future Enterprises, 2014; $14.99 tpb; 198/196 pages
Reviewing a book based on a beloved media property poses an interesting dilemma. Do you review it as a novel, standing on its own? Or do you review it through the lens of its franchise? In other words, regarding these two books, should the question be “are they good novels?” or “are they good Traveller novels?”
A little background. Traveller (always and forever with a double-l) is a tabletop roleplaying game written by Marc Miller in 1977. It was the first science fiction roleplaying game to get wide distribution and as such has retained its iconic position in the gaming hobby despite a rather rocky publishing history.
The original game (known fondly among old-school players as the “three little black books”) contained just rules and left the creation of a setting to individual gamemasters. But that quickly changed as various supplements and adventure books developed a complicated and diverse game universe spanning thousands of light-years and incorporating tens of thousands of inhabited worlds. The focus of the setting is the mighty Third Imperium along with human-dominated interstellar powers such as the telepathic Zhodani and the chauvinistic, Earth-centered Solomani, as well as nonhuman civilizations like the Aslan, the Hivers, the Vargr, and the militantly vegetarian K’kree.
When the book’s setting was created incrementally by hundreds of divers hands over the course of more than thirty years, that kind of rules out any critique of the story’s background in a review. Is it unrealistic to have a feudal interstellar empire? Probably. Is it derivative? Of course. But that’s what you get in the Traveller universe, so there’s no sense bitching about it.
The two novels, Fate of the Kinunir by Robert E. Vardeman, and Shadow of the Storm by Martin J. Dougherty, are published by Far Future Enterprises, the company Marc Miller set up to manage the franchise he created. In a nice nod to the traditions of the game, they’re printed in the same 8 1/2” x 5 1/2” trim size as the original Traveller game, and Fate of the Kinunir even uses the same graphic design as the old adventure books. They’re as Travellery as you can get.
Vardeman’s Fate of the Kinunir takes up one of the canonical mysteries of the game universe: the unexplained disappearance of the Imperial cruiser Kinunir. For Traveller fans, it’s a bit like a book about the Titanic or the Marie Celeste: they know something bad is going to happen.
The story chronicles the Kinunir’s final cruise under ace captain Rikart Telson. The ship is equipped with a brand-new, experimental artificial intelligence computer nicknamed “Allie,” and the new second-in-command, Laurel Franks, is much more concerned with field-testing the machine than the rest of her job. Kinunir encounters a yacht being attacked by pirates, and the crew of the yacht seem oddly reluctant to be rescued. The mystery deepens when Captain Telson discovers that the yacht is carrying a lot of strange experimental machinery, and its owner is the aristocratic ruler of a nearby star system on a mysterious errand.
Telson and Franks have to deal with the pirate threat and keep their ship operational while still trying to get to the bottom of the mystery before something really terrible happens. And then something really terrible does happen.
As a space-opera pulp novel, Fate of the Kinunir delivers enough space and ground battle scenes to keep the reader entertained. What it doesn’t deliver is surprise. Not to spoil the story or anything, but anyone who has read the brief summary I’ve given so far can figure out what happens to the Kinunir. And, unfortunately, the mechanism of the central disaster requires some absolutely astounding idiocy on the part of one of the characters coupled with equally astounding (and un-foreshadowed) expertise on the part of the villains.
Nor does Vardeman take advantage of his Titanic situation by building up any sense of impending doom as the story progresses. The characters dash about fighting people, have some arguments, and then ... the bad stuff happens all at once. There’s no sense of tragedy, no hero struggling against fate. The chief tragic flaw on display is distractibility.
Shadow of the Storm, by Martin J. Dougherty, is more space-navy action, this time focusing on a young officer named Simon Crowe of the Solomani Confederation fleet. The Solomani are rivals of the Imperium and have a kind of fascist-lite, one-party system with lots of propaganda, ubiquitous secret police, and a Political Officer with veto power sitting right next to the captain of every warship. Crowe’s career has been spotty: his first trip out he won the equivalent of the Medal of Honor, but shortly thereafter he got involved in an incident that required him to fire upon ships of his own side during a battle. His heroic past saved him from execution or jail time, but he was kicked out of the space navy.
Now Crowe’s been rehabilitated and put in command of a new frigate, the Stormshadow, to take on patrol along the tense border with the Imperium. The ship is new and full of defects, and the crew are a mix of political unreliables and incompetents, but Crowe is determined to succeed. During the cruise he faces pirates, suspicious Imperial visitors, and local governments with hidden agendas. He also has to cope with his own Political Officer, the ambitious and utterly doctrinaire Alice Browning.
Dougherty turns this into a cracking good Hornblower-in-space! novel, complete with sword duels, betrayal, divided loyalties, an Imperial plot to destabilize the Confederation, and (of course) a whole bunch of battles.
Crucially, Dougherty manages to subvert some of the reader’s expectations without being false to the spirit of the Traveller setting. Characters behave in surprising but convincing ways. Both Lieutenant-Commander Crowe and Political Officer Browning ultimately make choices which may startle the reader a little but which are absolutely in character.
So to return to my original question: according to which criteria should I judge these books? As Traveller books go, I would very narrowly give Fate of the Kinunir the better rating, as it resolves a mystery which has been bugging fans of the game since the 1970s. If you have a bunch of well-thumbed little black books in your game closet, that’s probably enough to make it worth picking up. But viewed strictly as a novel, Shadow of the Storm wins hands down. The plot is more tightly fitted, the characters are much better developed, and the story gives us a look at people in a society which is different in meaningful ways from our own. It’s an entertaining (if somewhat retro) space opera which readers who’ve never heard of Traveller before can enjoy.
James L. Cambias lives in Deerfield, Massachusetts.
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