(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia)
There are countless space operas out there in the world of science fiction, a great many of them imaginatively adept at crafting galaxies of possibility, good and bad, and of taking us on rip-roaring journey from planetary pillar to cometic post.
But not all of them have characters that absolutely seize and take control of your heart to the extent that when the story ends, you feel as if these people have become family and that you have been on a soul-trembling, heartstopping and emotion-shredding race across the galaxy, the kind that leaves you winded and exhausted and yet joyously alive to how profoundly good a found family can be.
Cascade Failure by L. M. Sagas is right up there with the very best of these superlatively good character-driven space operas and it’s largely thanks to an approach that is happy to take time to delve into the emotions at play as it is to put the pedal to the metal and rip through a planetary system in search of answers and justice.
Set at indeterminate point in the far future where corporations known as the Trust have settled the galaxy on a purely commercial basis, their ceaseless quest for profits over people held in check by the labour-championing Union, who as one of the pillars of the Establishment aren’t exactly squeaky clean either, with the Guild, a Greenpeace meets Amnesty International group acting as the conscience of the two.
This was the closest he’d gotten; closer than he’d started thinking he could get, to hell with the one-percent warning still glowing damningly in the corner. Could be another thirty minutes. Could be three seconds from now. As the drive registered, though, and lines of code started to scroll across the screen, he couldn’t bring himself to care.
If it didn’t work, he was probably dead anyway.
As Cascade Failure opens, the cosy threesome of AI captain, Eoan, who loves knowledge but likely people just as much, acerbically devoted ship’s engineer and medic Nash and ex-soldier and XO Saint are joined by Jal, a Guild deserter who has been on the run for three years and who joins the crew of the ramshackle Ambit quite by accident.
He is on a mission to clear his name and and expose the truth while the crew are set upon upon bringing him in, but then a distress call from an abandoned planet upends everything and the newly-minted bigger crew find themselves heading to a place which has been horrifically de-terraformed with a consequential body count which is almost too terrible to bear.
Apart from the mass graves which litter the now blighted planet, what the crew of the Ambit find is a live programmer, Anke, who might just know what’s happening to this planet and a string of others and who needs to be held accountable before any more lives are lost.
Witty and clever but devastatingly heartfelt too, Cascade Failure is a pellmell race to fix wrongs and find answers that evokes the work of Becky Chambers, J. S. Dewes and a great many other highly talented sci-fi writers, but which possesses a voice and feel all its very own.
Much of that comes down to the fact that while Cascade Failure has many of the elements of its genre compatriots, it’s also willing to take them and rearrange them in ways that deliver a solid whack of piercing and deeply affecting emotion.
(courtesy official author site)
In fact, much of the start of the book is devoted to what has happened to Jal and how his arrival on the Ambit, where is he is connected in ways that are comforting and distressing all at once, is not the seamless entry into anew found family that it might first appear.
While Jal does find a long-lost sense of belonging aboard the ship, there is a great deal of trauma associated with his arrival and what it summons from the past and how that relates to this present life, replete with family estrangement and sullied reputation, and Cascade Failure and Sagas isn’t afraid to take the requisite time to delve deeply into the history and the trauma and to give it the time to percolate into and infuse the narrative that develops in, of and around it.
This narrative patience and willingness to place humanity front and centre well and truly pays off, imbuing this rollicking space opera, full of witty banter and hilarious snark with an emotional depth and substance that, far from weighing down, propels the adventure in some fairly impactful ways because SO MUCH IS AT STAKE.
A good story of course should always have you caring for and concerned for its characters but Cascade Failure goes quite a few steps beyond that, making these people feel like the friends and family you didn’t know you needed and whom you need, at all costs, to be okay.
There was always going to be a price; she’d known that from the start. She just hadn’t known how high it would be. She hadn’t known someone else would have to pay it. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered as Nash’s shouts drifted up from the ground below.
With hot tears and cold rain wet on her cheeks, she let herself be led onto the ship.
And god, do you need them to be okay.
They are so well-formed, so alive and so much a part of the story rather than simply props for an all-consuming narrative that you swear they are leaping off the page and into your real life as you read.
That’s impossible since clearly none of us, least of all this reviewer, are living in a far-flung galaxy in the future – unless the multiverse is a thing in which case we may well be; still, not on this Earth anyway – but that’s how it feels.
These people feel flesh-and-blood real and that’s rare in any book but in Cascade Failure it feels like the reality you are dealing with and it means that this story full of intrigue, dirty-dealing and mercenaries set in a galactic world not our won feels very much like something tangible and organic.
Driven by characters that MATTER and a story that balances the allure of mystery with just the right number of reveals at just the right time, Cascade Failure is an absolute gem, a space opera that knows people, knows how cruel and duplicitous people can be, especially in positions of power, bur which celebrates how wondrously good certain of their number can be and how their connection can transform lives, rewrite the world, and bring justice, redemption and family to those who need it the most.