(courtesy Hachette Australia)
There is something breathtakingly thrilling about opening a sci-fi novel by an author you’ve never read before and finding an opening paragraph that sets the scene so vividly that in less than a quarter of a page you’re immediately thrust into a world and a story that you know will utterly subsume and envelope you.
That’s what the very best space operas do; they make you feel as if you are a part of a sprawling, magnificent world, not just a reader but an active onlooker watching as expressively realised characters play out a story that is as old as time when it comes to power and revenge and yet excitingly new and beautifully original.
These Burning Stars by Bethany Jacobs is right up there among the very best space opera this reviewer has ever read, and that’s not simply because it quite deservedly won the 2024 Philip K. Dick Award.
This is a story that combines the very best of everything – fully-realised world-building that makes it seems as if the theocratic authoritarianism and rigid religious piety of the ruling classes has always been in existence, that the planets they rule with false humility have always been under their thrall, and that the people who inhabit this totalitarian system have always upheld its unwavering religiosity or fought, subtlely or not, against it.
It is feels real, immediate and immersively visceral in a way few novels do.
Her ship alighted on the tarmac with engines snarling, hot air billowing out from beneath the thrusters. The hatch opened with a hiss and she disembarked to the stench of the jump gate that had so recently spit her into Ma’kess’s orbit — a small like piss and ozone.
Set in a far-future galaxy where generation ships long ago settled humanity on divergently fecund worlds, and where elite families rule commercially while real power lies with the Kindom, a Taliban-meets-mediveal-church grouping which worships six gods, with the most important of which solely dependent on which planet you hail from, These Burning Stars is a story of revenge, of people seeking to settle scores long-brewing and endlessly festering, but also of raw humanity, the kind that might hide behind warmly, if emptily uttered phrases of piety and devotion, but which, when the chips are down, becomes raw, violent and animalistic.
It is also the story of secrets, some so great they have the very real chance of bringing down an entire system of government, and the fight to either expose them or hide them depending on which outcome best suits your objectives.
No surprises that the Kindom wants to suppress the status quo-busting secrets at the heart of the story and that they will do anything to make sure their grip on long-established rule is not diminished in any way, shape or form.
But Jun Ironway, a thief who is determined to reunite and bring her much put-upon, once-elite family to safety and a life untroubled by vicious power politics, has found something, an object that holds a record of epoch-shaping events that differs markedly from the official record.
If it gets out, well, let’s just say, heads, many heads will roll, and a host of people are determined that that will never happen.
(image (c) Mary Ganster / courtesy official author site)
On Jun’s trail are two of the most piously brutal clerics of the Kindom, calmly religious but emotionally thoughtful Chono, and viciously uncomprising and hotheaded Esek who are the ones charged with ensuring that that ruling powers are untroubled by something as damaging as the truth.
And chasing them all is the mysterious Six, a product of the corrupt system of religious schooling which violently anonymises people and treats them as mere pawns in a greater game; it might seem like a system that works but it breaks and destroys as many people as it builds up, and while Six is as fearsome as they come, they are also bent on revenge so insidiously complete that standing against it might be all but impossible.
So, as would be evident from just that brief spoiler-free breakdown of the plot as its most high-level but beguilingly intriguing, These Burning Stars is a novel that pulsates, with quiet ferocity and bristling nuance, with vengeance and betrayal writ large, their corrosive effect spiralling to an ending that can’t possibly end well for anybody.
But ah, see, that is the brilliance to Jacobs’ wondrously well-written novel – while it follows paths expected, it has far more strands and threads that defy easy expectation, and in so doing, mean that while you think you know where the story is going, and partly you will be right, you also have no idea in the way that only the very best writers can manage with any impact or elegance.
Liis says, low and emotionless. ‘Jun would rather Esek kill us than have to hide.’
Jun’s stomach twists at the words, a combination of dread and guilt, and that uncanny feeling she still gets sometimes, when Liis proves how well she knows her. Especially the wretched parts of her.
The brilliance of These Burning Stars is that does a lot, and quite violently and full-on in every way, and yet still manages to feel like an intimate story of broken humanity, fallible souls and determined people who have weaponised themselves and the system in which they live for their own ends.
Not everyone can benefit from such an approach and it soon becomes clear that while the Kindom expect to prevail so too do the much-maligned Jeveni, a refugee people who may seem as if they are incapable of striking back but who, like the secrets Jun holds, may yet find a way to even the score in their favour.
It’s all so big and action-packed, and yet there is brooding sense all the way through of people ripped open and souls exposed in a way that can only be expressed and appreciated by souls willing to lay bare everything within them.
Thus, These Burning Stars is one of these space operas that sprawls and surges and consumes with real narrative energy and power, and yet which feels like an arrestingly quite study in humanity pushed to the limits, and with its back against the wall, forced to make some impossibly hard decisions.
These Burning Stars is brilliant in every conceivable way from its superlatively good and vivaciously alive writing to its intricately expansive plot and its vivaciously full characters to dialogue that zings with sorrowful loss and furious vengeance, all expressed with grounded Shakespearian emotional immediacy, and it is quite simply one of the best thing you will ever read, alive with the very worst and the very best of the human condition and all too aware that what is created can be just as easily and world-changingly destroyed.