Once and Future
The Once and Future series, Book 1
Cori McCarthy and A. R. Capetta
Little, Brown Books
Fiction, YA Fantasy/Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: Ari Helix never meant to start an intergalactic revolution against the all-powerful Mercer corporation. All she was trying to do was escape with her adopted brother Kay after they were caught stealing aboard the flagship/mall Heritage, crash-landing on the "retired" planet Old Earth. Then there was the graveyard, and the ancient oak with the sword stuck clean through it - a sword that comes free in her grasp, whose blade bears the name Excalibur. The next thing Ari knows, a strange teenager in old-fashioned eyeglasses pops up, claiming to be a wizard named Merlin and telling her she's the 42nd incarnation of none other than King Arthur himself. It all sounds like utter nonsense, until she sees Merlin's magic with her own eyes and feels the odd, instinctive pull in her soul.
Whenever Arthur returns, it is to claim a throne, overthrow a great evil, and unite humanity in peace. At least, that's how it's supposed to go. But, every time Merlin has lived through the cycle, something always goes terribly wrong. Not only does Morgana le Fay still haunt Merlin, if in noncorporeal (but still dangerous) form, but there always seems to be a Guinevere to break Arthur's heart, a Lancelot to betray him... and a dream of Camelot that dies in blood and grief, never to be realized. Even in a setting as vastly removed from ancient England as intergalactic space, the pieces seem to be aligning again for yet another tragedy that Merlin seems powerless to stop - unless Ari is finally the incarnation to succeed. But Merlin is far from the powerful old wizard he used to be, and no Arthur has ever faced an enemy as vast and manipulative as the Mercer corporation...
REVIEW: I knew, going into it, that this was going to be a riff on the ever-popular King Arthur cycle. And this does have many of the familiar pieces and players, if sometimes in unexpected roles. There is even a Queen Gwen, ruler of a breakaway world that doubles as a medieval-themed tourist trap (and who already broke Ari's heart once years ago). What I did not expect was that this book would feel so flimsy and derivative, with a setting that never feels very thoroughly thought out and characters that often feel more like caricatures or fanfic efforts by a passionate but not-quite-polished writer.
Ari and Kay start out as fugitives from Mercer "justice"; the corporation doesn't just have a monopoly on all trade and manufacturing (and food and water shipments), it also openly owns most every planetary and interplanetary governing body, justice system, and pretty much everything else that isn't nailed down - and if it is nailed down, they're prepared with metaphoric crowbars. Kay's mothers, now both incarcerated, were rebels with one of the many underground resistance efforts (who never seem to amount to more than a mild nuisance to Mercer's shadowy leader, known only as the Administrator), while Ari is an illegal refugee from a planet that was completely isolated by Mercer forces for being outspoken critics of the corporatocracy that essentially enslaves humanity. On fleeing to Old Earth, they pierce the hologram surrounding the "sanctuary" world (which is supposed to be a dedicated reserve, out of bounds of even corporate overlords) and discover the dark truth beneath: instead of a planet left to rewild itself, it's yet another thing being sucked to a husk by Mercer greed, autonomous robots stripping soil and harvesting half-dead trees and even chewing up abandoned cities and graveyards. It's here, of course, that Ari has a date with destiny in the form of an ancient weapon and legend, both of which are still culturally relevant for some reason; there seems to be a pop-culture following still for the vaguely medieval age (that doesn't really represent any actual historic age, mixing up Dark Ages with much later full plate armor and various other anachronisms that have been around so long most people don't bother questioning them) of common retellings of Arthurian tales, though whether or not this is because the Arthurian incarnations and periodic returns of actual wizardry in the form of Merlin (who, as in many versions of the tale, ages backwards) are real in this universe is never really explained. Indeed, a lot about this setting is never really explained, a strange mishmash of modern pop culture and dystopian future and Earthcentric terms in a post-Earth deep space. (There's not even a real attempt to explain or deal with this universe's faster-than-light travel, which must be a thing if we're talking about a civilization spanning multiple star systems, let alone three galaxies.) Merlin's magic elicits some minor skepticism, followed by a few oohs and ahhs, then basically shrugs all around... yet there's apparently no other magic in the entire stretch of civilized space, not even "sufficiently advanced tech"-magic. It all feels very thin and inconsistent, and the fact that I even noticed this thinness and inconsistency should say something about how much I was buying the whole storyline.
As for the characters, Ari wavers weirdly between an angry, scared, lost fugitive teen and a competent leader (out of nowhere - seriously, where would she have learned to lead at all, given the life she's led up to now? The reader is told that she's a great leader, but her "loyal" friends shatter like cheap glassware given half a chance...). Her first act, after fleeing Mercer "associates" who consider her a criminal by merely existing outside her quarantined world and finding Excalibur, is to go to a very public night club, stick the sword conspicuously in the middle of the dance floor, and party hardy. Later, they go out of their way to break Ari and Kay's moms out of a prison world... moms who sound like they'd be great assets when fomenting rebellion, but who are brushed off almost as soon as they're found (only to reappear later on in disappointingly minor roles, given all the buildup the reader had about how wonderful and competent and strong the two were). Merlin, meanwhile, is not the imposing, brooding mystic he used to be in the legends, now beset by teenage hormones to go with his teenage body (and the teen-level angst from millennia of failures). He has a decent enough arc as he reflects upon past mistakes, his failures to guide previous incarnations of Arthur to their glorious destiny... though there's one twist in his history that really made me cringe for potentially spoiler reasons (but which further deepened my feeling throughout that this was less an attempt to tell a solid standalone take on King Arthur in a space opera setting and more an excuse to play around with gender-bent shipping of canon characters... not that there's anything at all wrong with that, except when it happens at the cost of developing the actual story.) Guinevere takes on the form of a teenaged queen of the aforementioned planet that's basically a nonstop Ren Faire, and though she seems pretty competent and calculating as a monarch (and frankly has more of what it takes to rule than Ari), one really starts to wonder what happened to all the adults in this universe, as outside of the incarcerated moms, the Administrator, and the odd extra, there seems to be nobody over the physical age of nineteen anywhere in three galaxies. I've read many other Young Adult titles dominated by teen characters where I did not feel compelled to question this, which means that my suspension of disbelief was having some serious issues staying airborn. And that was long before the cliffhanger ending that adds yet another out-of-nowhere plot device/twist...
All of this is not to say that there's nothing at all I enjoyed about it. For one thing, it moves fairly well, and character interactions - for all that characterizations sometimes felt inconsistent - could be snappy and fun, not to mention emotional. Some of the ideas behind the story had a lot of potential. The sum of the parts, however, just does not add up to a greater whole. I've read other books that integrated magic, myth, and space to much better effect... just as I've read other updates of King Arthur that hit far more solidly than this. (Peter David's Knight Life kept springing to mind.)
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