Just Finished Reading: The Ascendant Stars by Michael Cobley (FP: 2011)

Once a forgotten backwater planet and home to a lost human colony, the world known as Darien is now the central focus of powerful forces. When the survivors of the Earth colony ship came to the attention of Sendrukan Hegemony and their Human clients they had no idea that powerful ancient technology had been discovered and partially uncovered by Darien archaeologists. Once the find had become public knowledge an increasing number of alien warships start to appear in orbit either offering help or threatening dire consequences. As civil war breaks out on the surface and warships clash in deep space an ancient enemy manages to open a gate between universes which, if left in place, will allow immensely powerful machines cast into a hyperspace prison millennium ago to escape and seek revenge on all life in the Galaxy. Ranged against them are the remnants of empires who fought in the last war against the killer machines, rebel humans and their local Darien allies who, far in their history, helped to defeat the ancient enemy at terrible cost. With much of the ancient technology lost, defective or simply unready there is little that the humans and their allies can do to defeat the legendary enemy of life itself. But on both sides of the conflict are entities that no one has seen and few can conceive of. The battle on, around, and for Darien is going to be like nothing anyone living has experienced before. If things go well the destruction will be truly astronomical. If things go badly all life in the galaxy could be extinguished. Either way there will be hell to pay.

This is the third book in the Humanity’s Fire series. I had thought it to be the last book in the trilogy but have learnt that the author has just produced number four. This is somewhat odd especially after there is actually a proper ending in this book with precious few loose ends! It’ll be interesting to see where he goes from there – if I choose to buy the next book. Although I did manage to make my way through the almost 600 pages of this epic space-opera I did find it a bit of a slog in far too many places. The author manages to produce generally well written and interesting characters and put them in well-constructed scenarios – but then pretty much ruins things by painting them into impossible corners only to pull them out of the fire in the nick of time using increasingly unlikely plot devices. Over the length of the book this became more and more irritating. It was as if the author had a great idea for a cliff hanger and then had no idea how to get a main character out of the trouble he’d put them in so had to pull ever larger rabbits out of ever bigger hats. Using alien or ancient technology to do this was no excuse and singularly failed to maintain the sense of disbelief so important to any kind of storytelling. I lost count of the number of times I had to laugh, roll my eyes at the latest escape and turn the page. Luckily for me the rest of the story, far-fetched though it was, was generally entertaining enough to keep me going if at times only just. This was a shame really as, in many other ways, the author shows himself more than capable of constructing narratives that flow well and characters that you want to see do well and survive. If only he could restrain himself from producing multiple cliff hangers in the name of maintaining or ramping up the suspense levels! If like me you had actually read the previous two books and wanted to know how things turned out I’d say to persevere with this as it is worth the effort to get through. If you’re coming to this series as a first time reader and wanted to know if the read of 1800 pages is worth your while I’d have to say, on balance, yes – but only just. If you’re after a good introduction to space opera I’d start somewhere else. Reasonable.