Our December book club book was The Darkship Thieves by Sara Hoyt. Because of the weather and my poor memory, the author wasn’t able to join us after all, but we still had an energetic discussion.

The story is a romantic space opera, told from the first-person perspective of a twenty-something princess with serious psychiatric problems. After her spaceship is mysteriously hijacked, the princess is rescued by a mutant pirate/miner, then taken to a libertarian asteroid-city. Hijinks ensue, a conspiracy is uncovered, and to no one’s surprise, the main couple does eventually admit their love. Don’t let the tone of my summary turn you off- one of the book’s strengths is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously.

We agreed that the coolest thing in the book is the “forest” ringing the earth. A geneticist designed these space trees, which use photosynthesis to make energy pods. The “miners” harvest the pods to provide cheap, abundant energy for the entire planet. The science is a little hand-wavy, but the important part is the imagery. The forest is a dark, twisted jungle, navigated by small ships with small crews, and made dangerous by the covert game of cops and robbers being played by legitimate miners and the titular thieves (flying mining ships painted black =”darkships”).

Although this is a book written by a female author about a female protagonist, I personally was disappointed that it didn’t pass the Bechdel test (1. two named female characters 2. have a conversation with each other 3. about something other than a man). There are only two occasions where the princess speaks to another woman - once to the miner’s sister, about how much they missed him, and once she orders her father’s female secretary out of the office at gunpoint. Her biker gang (“broomer lair”) only appears to have one other female member, who has no lines.

The princess definitely softens and becomes more complex as the book progresses, and everyone in the group liked her better at the end. Her romantic relationship gives her a more convincing emotional grounding, and revelations about her juvenile delinquency make a more interesting life story. One member pointed out that she doesn’t exactly grow a conscience - she just wants to avoid the inevitable conversation with her very lawful-good boyfriend about why she just killed a guy.

One of our members, a middle-aged male engineer, found the first-person POV too distracting, too far removed from his own experience, to even finish the book. The rest of us had varying reactions to the narrator, both as the “voice” of the story and as a main character. Several people mentioned that it was interesting to have a female character whose primary characteristic is anger and instability, rather than responsibility and caring. On the other hand, that did make her head an uncomfortable place to hang out over the course of an entire novel. We also had mixed reactions to the princess’s use of her body and sexuality to advance her own ends - it reminded one member of the X-Files episode where Scully flashes her cleavage to a teenager to test if he’s a human male, because no human male will resist the chance to take a peek.

There are definite shades of Heinlein’s libertarian tendencies (though I’ll take Luna City over the asteroid-city Eden any day). There are also explorations of a couple of ideas found in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan books. First, Hoyt uses some ideas about the artificial womb (uterine replicator) very reminiscent of Bujold - but there is also a hint of the idealism possible in a feudal political system, where the aristocrat has a personal obligation to every vassal.

One of the princess’s more appealing traits is her feeling of responsibility to the people she’s supposed to rule - when she stages her getaway from Eden, that’s the main reason she gives.

[spoilers]
Oddly, at the end of the book, the princess seems to abandon that idea in favor of living happily ever after with her boyfriend. All of our members (who finished the book) agreed that we’d like to read a sequel about the heavily-foreshadowed revolution that’s about to be led by the heirs of the current nobility. Will the ties binding their biker gang together hold through the coming storm? Can they use the princess’s connections to Eden to help reform the political system on earth? Will the princess go back and help at all?
[/spoilers]

Join us next time, Tuesday, February 7 at 6pm, for That Sweet Little Old Lady by Randall Garrett.