I just finished reading book five of “The Saga of Seven Suns” titled “Of Fire and Night”. The series is written by Kevin J. Anderson whose previously most famous works were the “Jedi Academy” trilogy in the Star Wars setting.
Five books into the seven book series and, honestly, I can’t decide if I actually like the series or not. I am far enough in now that I feel committed to seeing how the series ends but… Ugh, just something about the books at this point keeps me from being able to whole-heartedly recommend them.
The series is sci-fi in more of the ‘space opera’ style than actual ‘science’. It is set in a future where humanity sent eleven generation ships off to colonize other worlds. These ships were basically entire cities as the journey was anticipated to take more then a single generation to arrive. While looking for a habitable world the ships encountered the Ildirans, an alien race ruled by a Mage-Imperator (think ’emperor’) and possessing of a psychic link that ties every member of the race togethor.
The Ildirans returned one of the colony ships to Earth, gave humanity a working star-drive to allow fast space travel and helped the other colony ships to find planets to colonize.
Two of those colonies are important to the series in particular. The Roamers whose world failed them and returned to live as a nomadic traveling race, trading and mining starship fuel from gas giants. The world of Theroc which hosts a world-mind of trees that can communicate telepathically with a few humans known as Green Priests.
Yeah… Okay, so the setting could basically be ‘fantasy’ set in a large ocean with a lot of islands spread out from each other. It really is ‘space fantasy’ more than anything else which isn’t bad.
What is bad about it though is that by the time you get to the fifth book your ability to suspend disbelief really starts to get frayed as the cast of characters seem to be the single least lucky group of people to have ever existed. If an alien attack is going to happen, someone from the main cast is on-hand to watch. An ancient alien race asks for help, they ask on of the main characters.
There is a tricky balancing act between having too large of a cast for the readers to easily keep track of or to empathize with and that of having a cast so small that it really does seem like the entire universe rotates around just a handful of people. This book really does seem to sin greatly in the later direction.
I think the series as a whole could have been improved with the addition of a few more ‘disposable’ characters here and there, ones who exist simply to serve as the readers eyes-and-ears for a single chapter or two before either dying or being subsumed by a more major characters perspective and fading into the background. There are a few characters like that, but not enough to balance out the sheer amount of random stuff that happens to the remaining ones.
My other problem with the series is that it really lacks a depth of description. Even the most wondrous of scenes or settings get very described in very broad strokes, as if they should be able to easily evoke a common experience or memory the author and reader shares. Which works great if you are writing a Star Wars novel but when you have your own universe and setting an extra paragraph here or there of descriptive text would be nice. Five books in and I still can’t clearly picture a lot of major plot elements that show up again and again because the descriptions are so vague.
As negative as all that I have just written is, the books are still fun reads. While I can’t recommend them wholeheartedly as ‘great reads that I am sure you will love’ I can say that if you like your sci-fi to be a bit ‘space opera’ or ‘space fantasy’ish then you might want to at least pick up the first one at the library and give it a read.
I read the first one, “Hidden Empire”, years ago when it first came out in hardback but forgot about the series in the time between reading it and the second one was released. I just stumbled across it again at the book store the other day and decided to give it another read and went on the pick up the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th. I haven’t managed to find copies of the last two books in the series yet (6 and 7) but I do plan to finish the series off despite all its fault.
The series is seven books long (of which I have read the first 5 at the moment) and consists of:
1 – Hidden Empire
2 – A Forest of Stars
3 – Horizon Storms
4 – Scattered Suns
5 – Of Fire and Night
6 – Metal Swarm
7 – The Ashes of Worlds
EDIT – May 7, 2010: I have since finished the series and really… It stays ‘good’ and the writing quality does pick up a bit in the final two books, but I think really the series peaked for me with the cliffhanger at the end of the first book. It really is more ‘space fantasy’ than sci-fi, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but it just wasn’t what I was hoping for when I went to read the books.
If you prefer Star Wars to Star Trek, then this might be a series that is right up your sci-fi alley. If you prefer your sci-fi with a bit more ‘science’ to it than you may wish to look elsewhere.