Revenger (Alastair Reynolds)

Revenger
The Revenger series, Book 1
Alastair Reynolds
Orbit
Fiction, YA? Sci-Fi
**+ (Bad/Okay)

DESCRIPTION: It started as a youthful lark - or, at least, it did to Fura Ness. Her older sister, Adrana, wanted to sneak away from yet another boring party... off to Neural Alley and its forbidden shopfronts of fortune tellers and limb brokers and other unsavory aspects from across the Congregation of artificial worlds. As usual, Fura just trailed in her wake, getting a little thrill for defying their overprotective father, but fully expecting to be home for breakfast. Then Adrana reveals that she's fleeing to the sunjammer spaceship Monetta's Mourn as a Bone Caster, plugging into a neural link with the network of alien skulls that are far more reliable (if full of more tricks) than the standard squawk communicators, and she's sure Fura will have the talent for bonecasting too. It's just supposed to be for six months, enough to find a few prize baubles (ancient artificial worlds full of hidden loot from extinct aliens and previous Occupations) and rebuild the Ness family finances after Father's recent fumbles, and it's got to be more interesting than sitting around practicing needlework.
Then the Monetta's Mourn runs afoul of the legendary pirate Bosa Senna, who is even more brutal than her reputation. What was a simple bid for adventure and fortune turns deadly serious in a heartbeat.
Alone, left for dead on a derelict, the quiet, bookish Fura must step up to the challenge of surviving, recovering her abducted sister... and exacting revenge.

REVIEW: I was expecting, based on the cover and descriptions, a swashbuckling space adventure in the vein of several recent borderline-fantasy space operas, where larger than life piracy and quests for impossible wonders are transposed into a far-future star system crawling with tech that's more like magic than science in many respects. At times, Revenger delivers that. Unfortunately, it does so through the eyes of a character who starts (and, to a degree, stays) a strangely empty hole. Fura is initially just a tagalong, not just in body but in spirit. She drifts in bold Adrana's wake, and despite some token resistance to running away and some hints of internal thoughts I never got a sense of her as more than a plot-shaped void, especially early on. It was an odd feeling that made her transformation from dutiful daughter to revenge-driven space hunter largely unbelievable, though the compressed timespan of the story doesn't help; I simply could not buy her going from a sheltered girl not knowing a prow from a stern to full-on cold-blooded pirate stalker spitting (very annoying) space slang every other word in a span of months.
Perhaps because of this inability to connect with Fura, the world - crawling with smeerps such as "squawks" that are essentially radios and "flickerboxes" that are basically screens or monitors and "lungstuff" that's just breathable air, juxtaposed with plot-convenient oddities such as "lightvine" (a source of illumination that also provides part of a subplot that doesn't quite pay off) and the various fantastic loot found in baubles - just never gelled for me. There were just too many internal inconsistencies and anachronisms, and I was always too aware that this was a swashbuckling pirate story pushed out the airlock into the void, with only vague lip service to a lack of gravity and other issues. I also got a strange vibe off some of the peripheral characters, particularly the Ness father and the family doctor who were weirdly (creepily) obsessed with infantalizing the girls. Most of the rest of the characters were just vague smears with names.
The story moves reasonably fast, with plenty of action and overall weirdness, and it is imaginative, but I just never managed to immerse in it like I'd hoped to, and the rating suffers as a result.

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