Winds of Marque
The Blackwood and Virtue series, Book 1
Bennett R. Coles
Harper Voyager
Fiction, Adventure/Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: Second son of a minor lord, Liam Blackwood sought his fortune as many of his rank do, in the star-sailing navy of the interstellar human empire. He's a solid officer, rising to the rank of Subcommander, but all too often he finds himself second in command beneath higher-born men who consider fleet ships their personal toys - as happened when his captain, Lord Silverhawk, pushed the vessel Renaissance almost past its limits through a solar storm just for bragging rights at a party. Only the valor and hard work of the crew, and the quick thinking of one common-born underling in particular, Amelia Virtue, saved them all from disaster... but, of course, men like Silverhawk never bear the blame for near-disasters, unlike those of Liam's minimal family status. He needs a new commission while the Renaissance is in dry dock for extensive repairs, something preferably far away from Silverhawk and his kind - and finds salvation quite unexpectedly handed to him.
War with the inscrutable Sectoids is on the horizon, but pirates - always a problem in the spaceways - are becoming bolder in their attacks. If the outlaws and the threat they pose to supply lines aren't dealt with soon, then the imperial war effort is effectively dead in space, but any open efforts to round up the pirates may tip off the Sectoids that the Empire is preparing for war. To this end, the Empire has offered a letter of marque to the retrofitted frigate HMSS Daring, authorizing them to go undercover as common merchants and use any means necessary to track down the pirates to their lair and eliminate them - though if they mess up and are caught, the Empire will disavow any knowledge of their actions. It will mean working under yet another highborn captain, along with a new crew (of which he only is familiar with a handful, those he personally recruited from the Renaissance's idle sailors - including, of course, clever Virtue), but, as second in command on the Daring, this secret mission could make the fortune of Blackwood and everyone else on board... or ruin them forever if they fail.
REVIEW: A strong hero and solid heroine out to prove themselves to a world that underestimates them, a nefarious band of pirates, a fantastical space setting amid a dense star cluster where ships ply the complex solar winds under sail... Winds of Marque had many ingredients that should've made for a rollicking swashbuckler. Once in a while it actually reached that, but more often it seemed to fall short.
The tale starts with a handful of stock characters in a decently tense scene, as the captain obliviously pushes his vessel to the brink of ruin just so a rival won't beat him to a fancy ball on their destination world; Blackwood, his chief engineer equivalent Smith, and plucky Virtue manage to stay half a step ahead of disaster to pull the Renaissance through, even knowing that the damages will probably come out of their hides and careers while Silverhawk walks away without a blemish on his record. Though familiar tropes, they work fairly well in the scene, establishing the star-sailing world and social dynamics that drive much of the novel. But once the action dies down and the ship makes it to port, that world starts to feel a little thin and hollow. Though the reader sees some of the nobles and also some commoners, the latter don't seem particularly oppressed or abused among the crew; minor lordling Blackwood being demeaned and wronged by those of higher birth comes through loud and clear, and there's prejudice against other species (the insectlike Sectoids are universally feared, while the saurian Theropods - commonly termed "Brutes" - are often looked down on even as they're tolerated in menial positions), but until Virtue calls him out on his blindness to the plight of the everyman in a world where noble blood means immunity from laws and basic decency, the novel doesn't even bother getting into how commoners are generally treated by the empire. This discontent may or may not form the root of the growing piracy plight, but mostly the pirates are cardboard cutouts for the main characters to chase across the spaceways, cold-blooded killers, and some minor hints that there's something else going on behind them (other than greed or possibly cultish fanaticism) are completely forgotten by the end. Among the crew, the sense of everyone being a stock character going through stock character motions only grows stronger as the tale goes on.
That's not to say there's nothing enjoyable here. Those stock characters and tropes exist for a reason, in that they generally work to tell a story. The action sequences are exciting, melding the pitched battles of ship-to-ship combat with the added dangers of space travel. There's some intrigue with the possibilities of traitors on board and the obligatory threat of mutiny, as well as the expected romance between newly-promoted quartermaster Amelia Virtue and Subcommander Liam Blackwood. Underneath all that, unfortunately, I just never shook that sense of hollowness or flatness or a lack of that indefinable spark that takes a story from a collection of expected tropes and ideas into something stronger.
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