This is the fourth review of a full reads for Team 1.21 Gigawatts for the first round of SPSFC#5 by team judge Wick Welker. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.

Black Sails to Sunward by Sheila Jenné

Swashbuckling Space Adventure

Black Sails is a well-paced, well written space adventure where the author drops a high sea pirate adventure into an geopolitical space opera. This is a fun read driven over a complex romance that is intertwined with the political brinksmanship that bubbles up over the length of the story. There is always a bit of contrivance when an author tries to hammer well worn tropes into a science fiction setting involving a terraformed Mars at war with Earth and the author rides close to that line but I found it to be quite successful.

There were immersion challenges as I first started reading the book. I found an equine Victorian social structure on a terraformed Mars to be a tad too demanding of suspended belief. My initial misgivings gave way as the story picked up with the aristocratic protagonist suddenly thrust into a war in which she must sail on solar wind space ships that function and are crewed remarkably like deep sea ships. Again, this demands a lot of the reader up front but then you realize the author has actually done quite a bit of work in working out the technology and science in which they are trying to immerse the reader. In other words, the author does get the pirate space ship thing to work and to be quite enjoyable. Once that’s out of the way, you get a story full of political and romantic tension which are most definitely related.

I enjoyed that the protagonist has quite the arc by the end which greatly impacts the wider conflicts of the story. And as I approached the end, the author provides more details about why the socio-political structure is the way it is which I found satisfying. The only thing missing for me was a more explicit backstory of the protagonist. The romance and the protagonist’s arc would’ve had more of an impact if an emotional connection was established first with those elements.

Overall, this is a fun and smartly written adventure that I found satisfying.

Wick’s reviews are also all posted on his Goodreads profile. Wick’s website is here.