(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Australia)
Good lord but swashbuckling space operatic fun is good for the too tightly tied down soul.
When all the stresses and obligations of life have you feel suffocatingly pinned into a very small and ever-diminishing space, picking up a superlatively good piece of wide-ranging sci-fi storytelling such as Yume Kitasei’s The Stardust Grail which goes absolutely everywhere and with compellingly interesting characters along for a bumpy galactic ride, is just the tonic you need to feel a little freer.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that you’re getting some light and slight bubble bath-substantial romp into easily forgettable escapist storytelling.
Sure The Stardust Grail is escapist as only a good sci-fi space opera can be, and gloriously, hilariously, compellingly so, but it comes with some fairly weighty narrative drivers and some big questions about what should be prioritised over what and for what reasons.
After all, what one person considers a do-or-die priority is another person’s moral quagmire and so it is in The Stardust Grail in which Princeton anthropology grad student, Maya Hoshimoto, at some indeterminate point in the future where humanity has colonised the galaxy and got ongoingly cosy, sort of, with its diverse alien neighbours, find herself with a huge choice – save a relic and give it to her bestie alien Frenro pal Auncle for species-saving reasons or hand it over to Earth nationalists to save all of humanity’s ancestral and increasingly imperiled home?
Help, she [Maya] thought faintly. But it was already too late. Everything fractured into infinite pieces.
If that isn’t enough, she’s also having to cope with a lingering viral disease, which afflicts millions across the galaxy, species be damned, which gives her persistently terrifying visions of the future.
Can she avert what’s coming? Does she even want to? And why can’t she just be left alone to wallow in the wonderful world of civilisational objects and what they meant to the people who once owned and used them?
Well, you know, just like Donald Glover’s character in the first Lethal Weapon film, that she won’t be left alone to follow her bliss, and that The Stardust Grail will be power to hugely entertaining and emotionally meaningful degree by the universe’s unwillingness to simply leave her be.
Maya, despite her best efforts, is drawn back into her old life, grabbing items from across the galaxy for somewhat dubious reasons, and as she sprints off back into a galaxy full of age-old mysteries, fantastic ruins and objects that are bigger in intent and more important than they first appear, The Stardust Grail comes gloriously alive, not simply with some delicious pell-mell action but with some real, impactful emotional moments that add real heft to the Indiana Jones/Lara Croft: Tomb Raider moment of which there are happily many.
This highly engaging novel may move fast but that doesn’t mean it leaves it head of heart behind and serves you up with a hollow epic that vanishes from memory the moment you finish it; what you get it an elegant space opera that goes big on the action but also on what it all means too.
(courtesy Macmillan Publishers / Photo credit: Sylvie Rosokoff)
The world-building imagination is something really special too.
In no time flat, Kitasei scopes out a galaxy full of varied and diverse civilisations, of planets and places that defy any easy categorisation and a sense of otherness which challenges the idea that humanity is the centre of the known worlds.
Sure, for some people like the Earth nationalists it is, but for Outer Worlder Maya, who grew up in colonies far from humanity’s home but who loves weather and being on a real planet, and her friend Auncle, an alien who is her bestie but also a civilisation apart at times too, it is but a part of a richer, greater whole.
It’s this conflict of outlook that powers much of the narrative of The Stardust Grail but which also gives Maya so much of her thoughtful depth; she might play fast and loose with convention at times and be more than a little winningly self-serving but she cares about issues far beyond her parochial own, making her a powerful counterweight to people, such as one on her own crew, who argue that the needs of the human race trump all.
No issue is ever that simple, of course, and The Stardust Grail acknowledges that repeatedly and robustly, and quite meaningfully, and while it has its light and humourously magical moments, it is focused on some pretty serious stuff, all delivered in highly readable, page-turning form.
If there was one thing Maya’d always appreciated about flying with a Frenro, it was the continual wonder of learning how little she knew about anything.
Which was Liam’s point. She didn’t know. She didn’t know a thing. And that was good, because it gave her hope.
Charming and tender as much as it is full-on and uncompromising, The Stardust Grail is a brilliantly engaging piece of space opera that more than meets the thoughtfully interrogative promises of the genre.
Sci-fi always has the capacity to not simply entertain but to make you THINK and FEEL, and Kitasei absolutely makes the most of it, serving up a story that beguiles you with its wide-roaming wanderlust and strident intellectual curiosity and embrace of cultural richness and diversity and which knows that while all kinds of exciting forward momentum is a lot of fun, it ultimately leave you beached and dry if it doesn’t all mean something.
The good news is that The Stardust Grail means more than a little something and thanks to some real thoughtfulness in the writing and a love of characters, fully-formed and exuberantly and fulsomely expressed, it really hit home in some fairly powerful ways.
You finish this all-too-short but brilliantly expressed novel with a giddy rush of adventures lived and escapist imaginative storytelling given all the zest and vibrant buoyancy in the world, but also all too aware that perspectives matter, and that, while it’s all too easy to retreat into echo chambers of your own dogmatically orthodox choosing and act accordingly, as we’re alarmingly seeing in the world today, that we need look and feel wider if we are to land where The Stardust Grail does, not necessarily delivering what every character wants but what the galaxy as a complex whole needs and leaving everyone better off even if they don’t quite see it that way.