I enjoyed the two 'Wastelanders' books that Kristyn Merbeth released using just her initials, as K. S. Merbeth and was keen to dive into this space opera trilogy follow-up, wondering how she would cope shifting genres like that. Well, in a way, she remained on similar territory, starring a band of dysfunctional outsiders as her lead characters, though these are outsiders in different ways, most notably their diet. Read 'Bite' and 'Raid' and you'll understand that.

These leads are the Kaisers, a relatively broken family who serve as the crew of the titular ship, a vessel that bounces between the highly varied planets in the Nova Vita system, transporting what goods people are willing to pay them to transport, legal or illegal. They're 'Firefly', basically, but a real family rather than a found one, with each named for a constellation or galaxy. Mum is Auriga, the tough as nails matriarch who runs the show. Scorpia is the perpetually drunk young lady who acts as pilot. Lyre runs the engine room. Pol and Drom are a pair of wildcard twins. And Corvus is gone, fighting a war on his native Titan.

I should mention that Ma plays long games, one of them being to ensure that her kids were born on different planets, to increase their escape chances in the case of being blacklisted, a very real risk in their game. Scorpia was spaceborn, thus has no planet to call her own, not that she'd know which to pick if she could. Titan is bleak and icy and it breeds tougher citizens. Gaia is nominally as Earthlike as the system gets, but it's failing fast. Nibiru is a water world with artificial islands and a nomadic population who live on boats. Deva is a rich, luxury world while Pax is small and dusty. They're immensely easy to differentiate and that goes for their outlooks on their neighbours too. All very deliberate, I'm sure, even if it feels a little unlikely from a scientific standpoint.

Even though Scorpia lives on the Fortuna and Corvus is fighting on Titan, Merbeth alternates her chapters between the two, telling a pair of very different stories in the first person that we know will connect at the appropriate moment, given that Corvus is supposedly coming up on the end of his service period and will be coming home to the ship. Needless to say, that does not happen in a remotely simply fashion. The Kaisers have a habit of getting into trouble and, if they're not doing it themselves and to themselves, then trouble is bound to find them anyway, just because

We're never quite sure how long it's been since mankind colonised the Nova Vita system, but it's been long enough for these planets to find a particular balance and that balance is threatened by the growing calamity on Gaia. How that plays out, I'm not going to tell you because it's brutal and shocking and I want you to experience that trauma yourself without any further set up from me. Suffice it to say that the crew of the Fortuna are at the heart of it and that's not going to sit well with them, which means an interesting third act to find some sort of redemption.

I enjoyed this a great deal, even though it's a bit of a brick at over five hundred pages. I never felt that it ever dragged, even between pivotal story beats and even though the Kaisers have a heck of a lot of baggage to sort out, not least with Corvus's imminent return and the fact that Ma misled the rest of them as to why he went to Titan to fight. How much you enjoy this first book in a trilogy and likely the trilogy as a whole may well depend on how well you enjoy how Merbeth treats this family who constantly find themselves at the heart of it. If you don't like the Kaisers, even after a major set of changes wrought within these pages, then these books are not for you.

If, on the other hand, you appreciate how broken they are and how differently broken they end up, you might have a blast with this. Space opera is hardly a new genre and a lot of different authors have written a lot of different space operas, so there's not a lot that's particularly new here. The most original aspect is just how far Merbeth is willing to take things and how quickly. She doesn't hang around with her escalations and she's ruthless in how she makes us care for characters who aren't going to make it. I'm eager to dive into book two but worried at who might not survive all the way to book three. I want this dysfunctional family to become functional, even if they have to do it with baby steps.

Anyone daunted by the size of the book, physically, should know that it's an easy read. Merbeth is a dab hand at ending her chapters in such a way that we want to read just one more, even though it's four o'clock in the morning already and we have to be up for work soon. The vocabulary isn't at all challenging but  the relationships are complex, so we keep on turning pages. Also, beyond the core storyline, which we want to see progress, there's an elephant in the room that we're unable to ignore, even if the people of the Nova Vita system often can, which is that there was some sort of civilisation there before we colonised it. We get some progression there—boy, do we!—but the trilogy has two more books to go, so there's clearly a lot more to come about Primus tech.

And that means that I want to dive right into 'Memoria', the follow-up book, which was released in 2020, and from there onward into 'Discordia', the final book in the trilogy, that came out in 2021. I also want to see where she goes from here, because, while there are some similarities, this plays out very differently to the 'Wastelanders' duology. I don't see announcements about where she'll go from here, but I fully expect to be picking up whatever it happens to be. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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