(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia)
Plunging into the latest novel by John Scalzi, and fortunate to have read a number of his books before this, I was well aware of just good a writer this man is and how well he imagines realities beyond our own, bringing them to life with vivacity and visceral verve.
But what I didn’t count on in The Shattering Peace, is just good consummately good he is at ushering you into a universe you likely know little about if, like me, you have somehow managed to miss five of the six preceding entries in the Old Man’s War series which began in 2005 with, you guessed it, Old Man’s War.
While I have read and reviewed The End of all Things (2016), and thus had some idea of the universe in which the current novel is situated, there is something about being immersed in a universe over many novels that grants you a familiarity and ease with it than one or even two novels alone can’t achieve.
But fear not if your TBR is so large that it is threatening to topple over without warning and crush you in your sleep; while Scalzi and his published would no welcome you rushing out and buying the whole series, the fact is, if time is short, that you can well and truly enjoy The Shattering Peace without reading a single one of the novels that have gone before it.
‘I can take the judgment of everyone else who might condemn me. Yours is the only judgment that would break me.’ (Gretchen’s father to her)
So effortless is Scalzi’s ability to make you feel as if a universe you have never or barely encountered before is as familiar and knowable as an old friend that within pages of starting The Shattering Peace you feel as if you understand the world into which you have been artfully plunged.
In the universe in which The Shattering Peace takes place, Earth exists as the poorer cousin to the multi-planet human collective, the Colonial Union, and alongside the Conclave, a Federation-like gathering of 400 different alien species, all of whom are often at war with each other but for the last decade or so preceding the events of this novel, have reached a detente that has allowed all three some element, precarious though it might be, of collaborative effort to a brighter future.
The crown jewel of this new, tenuous joint endeavour is Unity Colony, an asteroid station which is home to a variety of species from all three political entities; the goal of this bringing together of species that are usually at each other’s throats is to forge a new mindset that sees collaboration, not bloody and violent competition as the default setting setting of the galaxy.
How successful Unity is depends on who you’re talking to and who’s writing the report, but all that matters not because, not long into The Shattering Peace, it turns out that ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- Unity has just vanished and no one explain where it’s gone.
Complicating things as they always do is the venerable race, the Consu, who are tens of thousands of years more advanced than the rest of the galaxy’s species, and who exert a god-like influence over their fellow species whom they regard as little more than very low lifeforms of little value.
(courtesy official John Scalzi Instagram)
But the Consu, it emerges, are still capable of a good old-fashioned civil war, or at least the maneuvering towards one, and when they fight, well, the rest of the galaxy is swept up into the melee whether they like it or not (and they don’t, of course, they don’t).
It’s up to a team composed of representatives from the Conclave, Earth and the Colonial Union, which includes the feisty, clever, well-trained in lethal defense, mid-level bureaucrat Gretchen Trujillo, to work out where Unity went and hopefully stop the Consu from ripping the galaxy apart as they fight each other.
There’s a LOT going on, and while it’s very clear from the narrative that its packed to the gills with epic moments and blockbustery twists and turns, The Shattering Peace feels like an elegant, exposition-rich soap opera that ticks all the boxes you could possibly want and then some.
Even better, while the storyline is very serious, and there’s a huge amount of potentially galaxy-ending things in play, The Shattering Peace is also incredibly, brilliantly funny.
Much of that comes down to the character of Trujillo who is every bit as witty as she is accomplished, with the dialogue she and others share so sparkling good that you stop reading quite a bit just to sit and savour how truly good it is.
‘And now we’re back where we started,’ I [Gretchen] said.
‘There is another option,’ Kitty said, and looked over at Ran.
It’s the dialogue that fuels much of the comedy in the novel, and its presence, woven throughout some very tense and portentous scenes leavens out The Shattering Peace so that while it remains desperately and intensely serious, it never feel like a leaden weight in you.
This superbly accomplished mix of the grim and the garrulous works an absolute treat, and coupled with the ease and naturalness with which Scalzi introduces you or reacquaints you with this world, makes The Shattering Peace one of this year’s standout sci-fi reads.
So good is it, and so well does it begin, sustain itself and end with not a single misstep to be seen, that you reach the final page and wish, wish, WISH that there was more to the story.
But then, if that were the case, this most perfectly realised of novels, set in a world that now feels like home, would feel quite perfect or deeply satisfying a read.
Thankfully Scalzi does the sensible thing and ends the novel exactly where he must, leaving The Shattering Peace a brilliant return to a much-loved universe, proof that you can take people, or at least someone like this reviewer, and not simply get them up to speed in elegantly record time with the setting but tell a story that has heart, heart, big ideas and a sense that, with the right person calling the shots, the very worst of possibilities can become the very best of outcomes and maybe everyone will live sort of happily ever after, after all.