COLD WELCOME

Cast adrift on stormy seas...

Ky Vatta faces a battle to survive in Elizabeth Moon’s latest space opera.

released 13 april 464 pages | paperback/ebook Author elizabeth Moon Publisher Orbit

The daughter of a wealthy family who ran away to space after difficulties during her military training, Admiral Ky Vatta is clever, determined and brave. As we meet her for the sixth time as the protagonist of one of Elizabeth Moon’s novels, the founder and commander of Space Defense Force is on her way back to her home planet of Slotter Key. This involves what should be a routine shuttle journey down to the planet… which is when things start to get tricky for Vatta. The shuttle is sabotaged, which leaves her and a clutch of survivors adrift in life rafts on an icy sea.

Accordingly, it’s a battle just to stay alive that gives much of the first half of this book its forward momentum. Drawing on her own military background and – at a guess – research into great maritime stories such as Ernest Shackleton’s epic voyage aboard the James Caird, Elizabeth Moon constructs a story of survival against the odds.

Cold Welcome draws on familiar themes in her work. How do you build a team from scratch? How do you keep discipline in desperate circumstances? Turning to Vetta more specifically: how do you assert command when, as a spaceship captain in a watery situation, your right to do so is ambiguous; and, moreover, deep down you’re not really that interested in hierarchies, except in so far as they help to getting the job done?

These scenes of battling the odds are terrific, making for an adventure story that’s written with an energy and pace that demands your attention. They would make a terrific novella in themselves.

What you make of the rest of the novel may depend largely on how far you’ve got with the preceding books in the Vatta’s War sequence. (Potential mild spoilers ahead if you’re working through them in order.) Backing up Vatta from afar are the bigwigs of the family, notably her steely great-aunt, Grace Lane Vatta, Slotter Key’s civilian Rector of Defence, and cousin Stella Vatta, CEO of the family shipping empire. So is Ky’s squeeze, Rafe Dunbarger, CEO of a corporation that makes ansibles, communicators that allow instant communication. While the wider universe assumes the admiral is dead, these three, who have seen Ky Vatta get out of scrapes before, understand that she’s made of stern stuff. As they orchestrate a search for her, a wider story of why the shuttle was sabotaged begins to play out.

Here we really are getting into spoiler territory, but let’s just say that if you sail into waters where the mapmakers of a previous era would have simply shrugged their shoulders at the lack of information and written “Here Be Dragons” (a continent where, everyone thinks, terraforming failed and nobody goes…), you may find some interesting secrets beginning to reveal themselves…

Here, perhaps, lies the reason Moon thinks there’s more mileage in Ky Vatta’s story. There’s a strong sense here that nobody in Cold Welcome really quite understands the technology they’re using, or how humanity even came to be in this part of the universe. If people could stop squabbling, the novel seems to suggest, they might get to answer some really interesting philosophical questions, such as how did we get here and what’s it all about anyway?

Any answers to such questions will have to wait for the next book in the Vatta’s Peace series, as Moon leaves things with a cliffhanger ending. Her answers, though, will probably be rooted in Golden Age SF, because she’s not a fancy writer who spends pages delineating characters. Rather, her brand of military SF is (while it doesn’t eschew serious themes) firmly rooted in conjuring up a ripping yarn – something at which she’s brilliantly gifted. Jonathan Wright

Elizabeth Moon spent three years in the Marine Corps after graduating in 1968, reaching the rank of 1st Lieutenant.

Scenes of battling the odds are terrific