(courtesy Hachette Australia)
Character is everything in an epic space opera.
Some may disagree, and no doubt will, claiming that its very storytelling DNA is given over to massive moments and breathtakingly huge narrative twists and turns and that it’s that which defines it and makes it so undeniably thrilling to read.
And yes, quite definitely, sci-fi of this expansive type needs those kinds of larger-than-a-galaxy narrative punctuation points, as it needs world-building on a grand and vivaciously imaginative scale and a sense of time and place that marks it as something existing well and truly outside of our own slice of humanity’s time on this planet, and now of course, out into the stars.
But what really makes all this pop, what makes it matter and feel like it’s worth a damn are the characters that inhabit it; for without them, all you have is some impressive storytelling on a superlatively big and enlivened stage which, while entertaining in the moment, pales away to nothing when it has run its course.
Think of those blockbusters you truly love, the classics of the genre that you return to over and over again; their premises may be ridiculous, their execution preposterous but you buy it all, without looking once at the price tag, because the characters sell it so well and connect with you so profoundly, that you will buy absolutely every last over-the-top moment they’re selling.
They humanise the extravagantly excessive, and they may make the larger-than-life feel like somewhere we inhabit, and they turn what could be outlandishly sprawling and emotionally at-arms-length feel like something intimate and relatable.
‘Because something seriously weird is going on?’ Paison asked. Naira tipped her chin down in response. ‘I hate that I agree with you. A dead planet, walking misprints, and before the crash, the Amaranth‘s AI wasn’t responding to verbal commands, and the controls were sluggish.’
‘We’ll manage.’ Naira hoped she sounded more confident than she felt.
Case in point is the luminously, wondrously and darkly good, The Blighted Stars, the first entry in the ominously and intriguingly named The Devoured Worlds trilogy, which is everything you could possibly want and need from a space opera.
It has a soaringly broad world in which it operates, a galaxy full of humanity on the brink of something great and good if they can just stop destroying the Earth-like planets they keep discovering.
Run by a corporate alliance known as MERIT (the initials of the surnames of the five constituent families) who have far more power than the civilian government which is ostensibly in power, the reach of humanity is every expanding and yet impoverished all the time, their continued survival pegged to a rare mineral called relkaktite, first found on Venus and now mined everywhere, its presence in the artificial golden pathways that line everyone with added strength, knowledge and skills, the key, so it is said, to humanity’s future progress and success.
At the centre of this set-up is the Mercator family, run by Acaelus who ruthlessly and without mercy ensures that everyone in his orbit, including his gentle, geologist son Tarquin, toes the line and keep their prosperity and grip on power intact.
His grasp on a galaxy-wide corporate empire seems assured and unassailable until an expedition to what’s known as the Sixth Cradle, an Earth-like world with a lush environment and plenty of relkatite goes very, very wrong, and suddenly all the certainties of life are thrown onto the solar winds and blown right out the corrupted starship window.
(courtesy official author site)
Somehow in the middle of this flawed and broken mission, Tarquin and a sworn enemy of the Mercator family, military wunderkind Naira Sharp, end up on Sixth Cradle which is now quite inexplicably dead and ruined, forced to work together if they are going to survive, and if they are going to surmount an unnerving conspiracy which is uncovered here and which could doom humanity as it stands right now.
That’s a LOT going on, and as space opera premises go, The Blighted Stars knocks it right out of the celestial park, with a thrillingly intense and compelling narrative, world-building up there with the effortlessly-realised very best, and a storyline that is well and truly up to sustaining a trilogy of immensely beguiling proportions.
It has it all, but what really marks it as something truly special is how beautifully O’Keefe, who wrote the novel and its two subsequent companions during COVID when there was time, yes, but also a thousand things pressing in on and crushing imagination and creativity, brings the characters which anchor it to life, especially its two leads, Tarquin and Naira.
These two polar opposites, who couldn’t one the surface be more different, form a bond which is as vibrantly alive as it is surprising and it’s the way in which they find an accommodation with each other, one not even remotely realised, that gives The Blighted Stars so much vivacity and turn the page with fearsomely eager speed readability.
Tarquin couldn’t stop himself from glancing in the direction Sharp had fled. He didn’t like being without a guard either.
‘We’ll make do,’ he said, and hoped he didn’t sound as defeated as felt.
In a story that quickly moves from a survival tale to grand corporate conspiracy to a horror-laced narrative which is Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets The Walking Dead with a little of the Star Trek’s Borg thrown in for good measure, what really grabs your attention is how much you care about the fulsomely-realised people at the centre of the story.
There’s a lot going on, and it’s big and mammoth and the implications are huge, but it’s testament to O’Keefe’s exemplary characterisation that Naira and Tarquin don’t get lost in all the exciting narrative momentum and inveigling noise, and in fact, rise above it, power it and keep it ticking over in ways that add so much rich, raw, affection humanity to proceedings.
In this race to a finish line of sorts, though not the final one naturally with two volumes in the trilogy still to come, you are focused on Naira and Tarquin who aren’t simply the lynchpins of an engrossing story but the very heart and soul, two people who find their preconceptions of good and bad of normalcy and certainty challenged massively at every turn and who manage to rise above it all and do what needs to be done.
There’s a thousand good reasons why they should toss in the towel, especially with the odds stacked against them, but they don’t and their quite understandable reactions to a range of bewildering immense twists and turns take this excitingly big and massive story, addictively enticing at every grippingly imaginative moment, and make it humanly small and intimate too, ensuring that though our hearts are most certainly in our mouths the whole way, that they are also very much with the two grounded characters at its centre whose success or otherwise matters to us and who will carry us onward into a story that may go big but which also goes enthrallingly small where it matters, ensuring The Blighted Stars is one of the best and most affecting space operas of recent times and one you can put down until its contemplatively intense but very human end.