Book Review: Hunting Party by Elizabeth Moon

Hunting Party
by Elizabeth Moon (Moon)

My science fiction club recently selected this book to read for one of our regular group book discussions, and I’m very glad I did. Though she’s a prolific author, I’d only ever read one other book by Elizabeth Moon (The Speed of Dark), which I loved, but which is a completely different type of novel.

 

Hunting Party is the first in a series (7 volumes so far) of “space operas/military SF” novels under the umbrella title The Serrano Legacy. Heris Serrano was forced to resign from a respected position in command of a ship in the Regular Space Service. Now, she’s taken a position as the captain of a luxury space yacht, for a rich eccentric woman, Lady Cecelia de Marktos, and must ferry her employer and some of Lady Cecelia's dilettante relatives to a distant planetary system for some old-fashioned fox hunting, by horseback. All of which sounds like an odd combination of characters and plot elements. But Moon makes them work. Heris is a fascinating character, and her relationship to Lady Cecelia becomes one of the strongest elements of the book. Moon provides a lot of great details about military and social protocols, there’s an unusual amount of time (for a space saga) spent on horseback riding, and there are twists and turns aplenty, including the introduction of a “most dangerous game” subplot late in the book.

 

In the end, some of the plot threads end up wrapping up in not-entirely-satisfactory ways, but the journey of following Heris and Lady Cecelia, and several other very strong female characters, in a type of storyline usually dominated by males, made Hunting Party a very enjoyable read. I hope to continue with additional volumes in the future.

 

[ official Serrano Legacy series page on the official Elizabeth Moon web site ]

 

Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library – Public Service

 

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Book Review: The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi

The Collapsing Empire
by John Scalzi

The Collapsing Empire is the beginning of a science fiction trilogy called The Interdependency, which was completed in April 2020. It’s a story about environmental change that’s about to kill all of human society across dozens of star systems and the politics of doing something about it. This is unabashedly an analogy to our planet’s climate change situation.

The setup is that humanity is inhabiting all of these star systems due to a series of one-way wormholes called the Flow. Most of the action takes place in the ruling system which has the most wormhole entrances and exits “Hub,” and the system that’s the hardest to reach “End.” The political body that stretches across all of these systems is called “The Interdependency” because no system is self-sustaining due to all noble families having monopolies on essential goods and services. This was set up on purpose millennia ago by one woman who wanted to force everyone to get along.

That’s all well and good until a few Flow physicists start realizing that the wormholes are about to change…and then one winks out of existence. The physicist for a major noble family believes the end result is that End is going to become the new Hub, so the family plots to take over the planet — and rule of the Interdependency — before everyone else notices. A father-son team of Flow physicists on End come to a different conclusion: the Flows are all going away, not shifting.

This means a scientist who’s great with data and not great with politics needs to tell everyone that they’re all about to die and they need to act before it’s too late, and it might already be too late. Meanwhile, the noble family who wants to take advantage of the situation doesn’t want anyone to suspect something unusual is going on, and they have no qualms about murdering their way to the top. Caught in the middle of this is a young woman who wasn’t supposed to be heir to the Interdependency, but now she’s newly in charge and low in everyone’s estimation.

But they have no idea how hard she’s willing to go to save humanity. She has something no one else does: access to every leader’s mind stretching back to the beginning.

As with all Scalzi books, this is action-packed and filled with verbal badassery. The villains are a delight. One reluctant hero uses curse words as her punctuation marks of choice. There’s more than a little connection with Herbert’s Dune books, but this is both more light-hearted for much of its tone and more hard-hitting to read because it’s so relatable to our real life.

Most major characters are not white. One major character is pansexual.

Unfortunately, the noble house of Amazon has a monopoly on the audiobooks for this series, so you can’t listen to Will Wheaton joyfully cussing his way through this series via library checkout.

[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try the Dune series by Frank Herbert, or the Expanse series by James S.A. Corey.] [ publisher’s official Collapsing Empire web page ] | [ official John Scalzi blog ]

See Scott C.’s review of John Scalzi’s Hugo-winning novel Redshirts, on BookGuide in January 2013
See Scott C.’s review of John Scalzi’s essay collection Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded, on BookGuide in January 2013

Recommended by Garren H.
Bennett Martin Public Library

Have you read this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Guardians of the Galaxy (on DVD)

Guardians of the Galaxy
[DVD Guardians]

After tracking down and stealing a mysterious orb Peter Quill — also known as Starlord — finds himself in hot water, being chased by Gamora, who was sent by a villain named Ronan the Accuser to retrieve the orb. Little does Ronan know Gamora has her own plan to sell the orb to The Collector but her plan gets back-burned when she and Peter are arrested along with bounty hunters Rocket and Groot who attempted to capture Peter for money. In jail they meet Drax who hates Ronan because he killed his wife and daughter. The five of them break out of a prison together and decide to take the orb to The Collector and split the profit. This plan goes awry and the orb is stolen by Ronan's minions. When they realize how dangerous the orb really is the team vows to retrieve it and take it to Nova Prime where it will be safe. This is harder than it sounds because with the orb in his possession Ronan becomes even more powerful. I liked the characters, I thought the actors portrayed them very well, and the storyline was good but my favorite part was actually the soundtrack. -- recommended by Carrie K. - Bennett Martin Public Library [ see Carrie's Reviewer Profile and more of her reviews ]

[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try other Marvel superhero movies like The Avengers, Captain America, Iron Man, the Hulk, and Thor.]

[ Internet Movie Database entry for this film ] | [ official Guardians of the Galaxy web site ]

Have you seen this? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewers recommendations!