Customer Reviews

Pirate Sun: Book Three of Virga

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Over the years, many writers have featured sword fights in space. Some have even featured pirates ships, pre-industrial cities, and so on. But typically, this involves either ignoring the illogic of the situation or hand-waving about levels of shield, etc. Karl Schroeder took a third path, one with an explanation that makes sense. Virga is a planet-size ballon in space. It's filled with air, and various nations and cities float within. The only gravity is produced by rotation. Travel between worlds can be by wooden ship or bicycles of sorts (or motor bike). And technology is kept at a pre-electronics level by a field generated by the central sun, Candesce. Virga took this step at its creation to keep our "artificial nature," the AI and nanotechnology swarm that is transforming the rest of inhabited space into an ever-changing virtual reality.

In the first book of the series, Sun of Suns, Admiral Chaison Fanning and his wife Venera (brilliant and often ruthless). They captured the key to Candesce, which enabled them to temporarily shut down the suppression field and thus use radar in a military action. The second book followed Venera as she fled the aftermath. The latest book, Pirate Sun, follows Chaison.

As the novel begins, Chaison if a prisoner of the rival nation of Falcon Formation, whose fleet he had severely damaged in his radar-enabled attack. Someone breaks Chaison out of the prison, and, with two companions who are also freed, and with a young woman, Antae Argyre, who seems to be helping him to escape, Chaison tries to make his way home.
The book is filled with wonders: a flood in low/zero gravity, two cities literaly going to war, a space battle involving wooden ships and a free-fall city. It reminds me in parts of Jack Vance, with its brilliant inventiveness and rich societies.

But Schroeder also has a talent for characterization, and Chaison and Venera Fanning are a brilliantly drawn, interesting, and likeable pair of characters. Part of what makes them this is that they grow as the series goes on. In the first book, Venera is ruthless and not very likeable. The second books is not only the story of how she escapes and re-establishes herself but one of her own growth as a person. Likewise, Chaison grows over the course of the novels.

Schroeder has become one of our best current SF writers. Pirate Sun should be on the Hugo ballot next year.

It has been a great pleasure to witness Karl Schroeder's storytelling skill and descriptive gifts mature and flourish through the Virga series. Sun of Suns and Queen of Candesce were both really good, but in Pirate Sun Schroeder really hits his stride. The book neatly ties together the story arcs from the first two books with a rousing tale full of zero-g cutlass-clashing combat, complex characters with multiple levels of motivation, and beautifully rendered descriptions of his innovative world. His vision of how the people of Virga live, move about, make a living, play, and fight in a world without natural gravity is very well thought out and technically sound. I for one would love to see Miyazaki make a movie version of this series!

The third book of Virga does not focus on one character as much as the second book (Queen of Candesce) does. In that sense it feels more like the first book. Again Schoeder explores more of the consequences of the unique world he has constructed, and hints at more of its relationship with the outside world. I was a little disappointed that we didn't get to meet up again with Hayden Griffin. Although the three books work well as a trilogy, I'm hoping Schroeder returns again to Virga. His combination of steam punk, space opera, and post-singularity SF is a hard one to beat.

The book centers around an interesting environment, an oxygen-filled sphere without gravity. This makes for interesting living scenarios, and dog fights like nothing I've seen before. Definitely worth picking up, if only for the novelty.

The conclusion of a good series of books patterned after Larry Niven's Ringworld. This volume is not quite as good as its predecessors because Schroeder doesn't introduce any particularly novel features in this book. In addition, while the primary characters in the prior books underwent some development in the course of each book, character development here is relatively static.

In Virga, Admiral Chaison Fanning learns no good deed goes unpunished. His bodacious foray prevented an assault on his orb Slipstream; he was imprisoned for his actions, but he is liberated by he assumes his daring subversive wife Venera who when he was first captured he saw fleeing.

Returning to his town, to his amazement, Fanning is considered a traitor by those he saved; he expected the ruler who initially betrayed him to paint him as such but not his neighbors. As revolution, civil war, and outside invasion threaten the Virga spheres, he fights alongside Antaea Argyre, who is from another orb of the "system" near its edges. There he begins to understand there is much more to the universe than just what is connected to Virga's central sun Candesce.

As with the first two books of the Virga chronicle (see SUN OF SUNS and QUEEN OF CANDESCE), it is the variety of town-spheres that make for a complex exciting science fiction saga in which anything seems possible under the sun (of Candesce that is). The story line is fast-paced from the onset as Fanning, though scorned and swiftboated continues to do what he thinks is the ethically right thing for the good of his people. His escapades never slow down as Karl Schroeder provides a strong outer space opera thriller.

Harriet Klausner