A Pale Light in the Black (K. B. Wagers)

A Pale Light in the Black
The NeoG series, Book 1
K. B. Wagers
Harper Voyager
Fiction, Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: Centuries after the Collapse nearly ended the species, humans have spread through the solar system and, thanks to emergent wormhole tech and breakthroughs in both terraforming and life extension, a handful of nearby stars... and where humans go, problems inevitably follow. While the Navy handles the more prestigious roles of exploration and extrasolar affairs, the local system is protected by the often-maligned and eternally underfunded but vitally important Near Earth Orbit Guard, or NeoG. It's the sort of job that attracts misfits and wayward souls, the kind who wouldn't fit in with other branches of service... and the kind of place where bonds of family can be forged even between the least likely of shipmates.
Maxine "Max" Carmichael was once the youngest heir to perhaps the wealthiest and most powerful family business in human space, the manufacturers of LifeX that both extends the human lifespan and enhances resistances to the radiation of space travel. She turned her back on the prestige and the pressure, defying her parents by applying to the NeoG and further defying them by rejecting the cushy desk job they'd pulled strings to land her in. Instead, Max chose to ship out aboard an Interceptor, one of the durable yet aging fleet of vessels patrolling Sol's spaceways. She enters the crew under inauspicious circumstances, as the replacement for a favored lieutenant aboard the ship Zuma's Ghost. It's extra bad timing, because Captain Rosa and the rest of the crew are still smarting from a close loss in last year's Boarding Games, the not-quite-friendly annual competition between military branches, and everyone was hoping that Lieutenant Nika's sword arm would help carry them to victory this year. And, as further bad luck would have it, Nika is the beloved adopted brother of Officer Jenks, the crew's roughest edged and hottest headed member. If Max wants to make a home here, she's going to have to work extra hard to earn a place among the crew. And when they inadvertently stumble across a secret that could rock the spaceways to their core, she'll need a good crew to trust - and the crew will have to learn to trust her, as well.

REVIEW: As I was listening to this title, I kept finding myself thinking I wanted more out of it. More of what, I couldn't quite put my finger on, until maybe about halfway through. What I wanted more of was the story I was promised, yet never quite got.
Oh, there are all the trappings of a space opera, and it's a reasonably solid world Wagers builds, a future where humans manage to pull out of our current death spiral and rebuild, if not with entirely clean hands and with devastating ecological losses. There's the expected collection of eccentric characters, though most of them remain sadly flat caricatures on the page... and all of them, even the asexual Max, somehow need to have love interests to validate them and their fragile sense of self-worth repeatedly, which sort of undercut the whole "independent spacer female" vibe, especially the third or fourth or tenth time they break down and have to have their love interest or their found family piece them back together. Then there's the plot, which never really decided if it wanted to be more about the Boarding Games or about the dangerous interstellar conspiracy the crew stumbles into. Far too much time and energy ends up going to the games, which never paid off in any meaningful way because the conclusion is pretty much telegraphed (and doesn't even really affect anything; the crew had already bonded, so it's not even like the competition was the thing that pulled them all together). The conspiracy, by far the more interesting storyline and one that digs into aspects of the worldbuilding that I wanted to explore more, gets back burnered so long that by the time Wagers gets around to revealing the big baddie, their appearance is rushed and they come across like a cardboard cutout of a monologuing villain, spouting shallow extremist ideas that the characters can easily brush off as fanatical and not worth listening to. There's also a subplot about the captain's faith and family issues that, like the games, eats a lot of story time and engenders a lot of self-doubt and angst to ultimately fizzle out in a non-event. And there's also a robot dog, Doge, which only exists to play up Jenks's odd obsession with the 21st century (which also, need I say it again by now, never paid off).
By the end, while I didn't hate the story, I wound up feeling like not nearly as much had happened as really should have happened, and that if Wagers had trimmed back some of the games and the overused/overplayed character angst and bonding moments, there would've been more time to develop that conspiracy and the villain to make the climax properly pay off. As it was, I can't say that I feel at all compelled to read more of the NeoG or the adventures of Zuma's Ghost.

You Might Also Enjoy:
Trading in Danger (Elizabeth Moon) - My Review
Embers of War (Gareth L. Powell) - My Review
Chilling Effect (Valerie Valdez) - My Review