This is my first new review of a full read for Team 1.21 Gigawatts for the first round of SPSFC#5. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.

The book is Black Sails to Sunward by Sheila Jenné. The book is available from many retailers.

Blurb

Lucy, an officer of the Imperial Navy, and Moira, her former best friend, find themselves on opposite sides of a war that threatens their home. Yet the crackling attraction between them hasn’t faded, and it’s time for Lucy to make a choice between loyalty and her own conscience.

My Review

I really enjoyed my time with this book. From the scouting round, where we read the first part of each book to come to our quarterfinalists, it was my favorite of the ones I sampled, and it held up as I read the full book as an official quarterfinalist pick. It’s a book that combines a lot of different kinds of stories. It was a solar-system-based sci fi story of a war between Mars and Earth, but rather than a hard-sci-fi approach as in The Expanse, this threw in elements of British naval stories like Master and Commander along with regency romance. You might be wondering how that’s possible, but Jenné takes a semi-bonkers premise, mixes it with just the right amount of arm-waving, and comes out with a fun tale full of (astro)nautical adventure, romance, class conflict, canvaspunk, and politics. If you’re willing to go for that kind of head-spinning ride, the book absolutely delivers.

Plot and Characters

NOTE: MINOR SPOILERS FOLLOW.

The book almost exclusively focuses on Lucy Prescott, a daughter of a Martian noble family who was destined for high society, but whose family has fallen on hard times, forcing her to enlist in the Martian Emprex’s fleet as the lowest rank of the officer class, a midshipman, complete with breeches, coats with brass buttons, and a tricorn hat. Lucy’s first voyage on the ship is a delight, showing how the ship operates, how the officers and crew deal with each other, and how she navigates some difficulties with crew and with Moira, a former servant of hers whom she discovers serving on the ship. There is a single chapter later on that somewhat jarringly jumps to Moira’s perspective, but otherwise, it’s the Lucy show.

The world Lucy lives in is a little far-fetched, and how much you enjoy the book will likely rest on how willing you are to accept this future. A background primer as I understood it:

  • Mars was settled by Earth scientists hoping to terraform it into a habitable planet
  • Earth corporations were more interested in stripping Mars of resources, setting up a conflict between Earth and its colony.
  • At some point in the recent past, there was a technological meltdown involving computers and AI, which massively disrupted both Earth and Mars.
  • In the aftermath, both Earth and Mars have sworn off computers entirely, leading them into a technological state full of contrasts. For example, they have hydroponics and space travel, but the ships are made mostly of heavily altered wood and have huge cloth sails to catch the solar wind. They navigate space like sailors of old, with sextants and mental math. They fight mostly with torpedos, but they switch to swords and knives when they board each others’ ships.
  • Mars has adopted a kind of a neofeudal system, with nobles descended from the original Martian scientist settlers presiding over a much larger peasant class. This looks and feels a lot like a kind of Martian Bridgerton.
  • Earth’s demands of Mars grew too onerous and exploitative, jeopardizing the terraforming projects, so Mars and Earth are now at war, with warring fleets of sailing ships traversing the space between them, conducting raids, captures against the enemy.

The plot centers around Lucy’s work as a new officer on a Martian warship, at first learning her role, then acting in it, which forces her to make tough choices and reevaluate the society and culture in which she’s lived a privileged life. As her journey continues, she faces Earth forces, pirates, hazards, deception, and romance. She changes and grows throughout her challenges as she decides what kind of officer and what kind of person she wants to be, and most importantly, where her loyalties lie.

My Thoughts

Like Bisection, Jenné’s finalist in last year’s SPSFC, this book is well-written and engaging throughout. That book had a big what-if central issue centered on the main character’s biology, while this one is much more of a traditional rollicking adventure, albeit in a tremendously weird (and delightful) imagined future.

For me as a reader, I loved the huge swing Jenné took here with the story. All sci-fi is speculative, imagining stories and futures that don’t exist, but this book is especially (and tremendously) ambitious, creating a society and technology reminiscent of 18th-century Britain, but setting it in space, and throwing in a rousing and harrowing naval adventure tale as the meat of it. To Jenné’s credit, she has solid and consistent reasons for why society is how it is and why technology is how it is, although believing this would all be possible might be a challenge for some readers. Jenné is also wise enough to give you lots of hints and snippets about how things work without trying to explain all the details. That gives you a sense of verisimilitude, at least a verisimilitude that the characters fully accept. Whenever you start to think too hard about how the tech or the military actions or the culture would actually work, you start to lose what is magical about the story, so I tried not to do that as much as I could. There’s a lot of technical detail shared about life on the ships, and there’s a bunch of physics, engineering, and zero-gee adaptation that are described ably, so it’s not all arm-waving – not in the least.

If you are willing to accept the setting and the tech, which is admittedly a big ask, then you get a really great, really imaginative story. Lucy’s journey through her challenges, and her interactions with people both savory and unsavory, are a delight to follow. I don’t want to spoil it, because it’s fun, but there are naval battles, crew struggles, betrayal, cutlass fights, stealth missions, subterfuge, and more. I really loved the Master and Commander parts of life as a minor officer on a ship of war – those parts really sang. Some of the story wrestles quite effectively with old-school naval officer issues like honor, duty, and the limits of what a society and a commander can expect of you, and what you can accept in the name of following orders.

Where the book showed a little weakness for me was in two areas. One was coincidence – Lucy frequently meets people (or re-meets people) that it seemed to me highly unlikely she would run into, unless there are only a few hundred people in space, which is not the impression I think I was supposed to get. There are also some deus ex machina moments in some of her adventures and misadventures where just the right thing happens at just the right time, whether it’s a discovery or a breakthrough or a foe’s mistake or a purloined tool. The other weakness I perceived was in Lucy’s internal journey. As a whole, it was interesting and effectively portrayed, with lots of real growth, but there were times where she seemed to retreat into a foolish, naive, and indecisive state which was in stark contrast to the plucky, whip-smart person we’d seen in the rest of it. Especially as she’s deciding on her priorities and actions at the end, I felt she wallowed in indecision and then made choices that seemed somewhat inconsistent with the thoughts we’d seen just pages before. This wasn’t a big problem, but it took me out of the story a bit, especially when her naive/foolish bits got turned up higher (e.g. when she was evaluating her relationship with annoyingly little perception or insight, or when she didn’t recognize her own initials). The love story that develops was interesting and fun to follow, but again, I’m not sure it felt completely real to me, although Lucy’s thoughts and desires and concerns were well portrayed, and it added a strong motivation and difficult choice for Lucy to make.

All of that is just minor nitpicks and can be easily ignored. The story was just fun for me throughout. The resolution was one I did not see coming, and it found a way to be far more satisfying than the terrible options it seemed might come to pass. I really enjoyed reading Lucy’s adventures, and I’m a sucker for naval derring-do, which this book has in spades. Jenné’s willingness to throw in some science and physics and engineering without overdoing it and spoiling the magic of her premise was a terrific balance to strike. Great fun, and ably constructed despite the tall challenge. Jenné embraces the bonkers and just flies with it in the best way.

Summation

If you’re willing to come at Black Sails to Sunward with an open mind and accept some of its fundamental audacity at face value, you’ll be in for a real treat. A heartfelt and thrilling tale of struggle, hope, love, and despair, all set in a canvaspunk (yes, I’m trying to make that a thing) future full of tall sails, fierce pirates, and broadsides in the black ocean between planets.