Corey J. White’s Static Ruin and Spencer Ellsworth’s Memory’s Blade each willingly bring to a conclusion a space opera trilogy started in the flush of Tor.com’s season of space opera two years back.
In Corey J. White’s trilogy (Void Black Shadow, Killing Gravity, Static Ruin), we see the story of the Voidwitch, Mars Xi. She has gotten more powerful and sure of her abilities since the first two books in the series, fully becoming one of the most terrifying beings around. The Empire fears her, and quite rightly, given that she did sort of use a moon as a weapon in Killing Gravity, Thanos style. But as she has escaped from those who made her, and has fought to try and free those who have helped her, Mars has gained two things that drive her in this third book. First is Pale, whom she rescued in Killing Gravity, a voidwitch like her, but wracked with seizures and implants from being turned into a would-be living weapon. Mars would like to help Pale, seeing in him what she might have become, a tool and nothing more.
And then there is her father, Marius Teo. Her father has lurked as a plot driver since before the start of the first novella, Void Black Shadow, since it was her father who had sold her off in the first place. Mars wants answers, and a reckoning with him, and maybe it could be he who could help Pale, since it is his doing that created Mars in the first place. And so, now that Pale has been freed, and Mars has a ship of her own (run by a trusty AI, Waren, a delight of a character), Mars has the means to do what she wants to do for a change.
So, with her trusty feline-like companion Ocho (the eighth of her line), Mars and Pale travel to distant portions of the galaxy in search of help, her father, and finally answers. And, well, since she did use a moon as a weapon in Killing Gravity, the empire is hot on her heels. This turns out to be a very personal story of reckoning with family, legacy, heritage and living up to obligations, with the occasional application of a bit of the old ultraviolence. Find her father, find the truth of her heritage, help Pale, stay alive, and sometimes deal with the Empire chasing her. This is not the story I had initially expected.
What White understands, and uses to good effect in Static Ruin, is the fact that although Mars is strong, strong enough that a corvette spaceship coming against her has the chances of a piece of paper crumpled in her first, that it is the personal stories and motivations and conflicts that can drive a narrative, provide conflict and tell an interesting tale. Yes, Mars is dangerously powerful, someone to run away from very very fast, or better, never get into conflict with at all. And yet for all that, she is very human and her vulnerabilities and her concerns are so very human. All the power in her mind is set against personal concerns. So rather than upping the physical stakes to more and more, what White does is to increase the emotional, the personal stakes to higher limits, to force conflict and resolution in the story.
In the end, Mars’ story, even for all of her power and ability, is not about the fate of an empire, the galaxy, all of humanity, and never was meant to. The Empire that we see in the three books does for the most part remain offstage and only touches on Mars through the corporations and organizations that she deals with. She visits various planets, particularly in this third book, Static Ruin, but there is no sense that Mars is ever going to go and try and knock over the Empire whole—that’s not what she is interested in, and not what the author is interested in either.
By contrast, the scale in Spencer Ellsworth’s series (A Red Peace, Shadow Sun Seven, Memory’s Blade) is for larger stakes, the fate of the galaxy is most definitely at stake. Certainly the stories of Jaqi and Araskar, would-be Saint, and former soldier for the Resistance, are central to this third volume. Their struggle against John Starfire, just trying to survive and thrive in a crazy quilt space opera universe, is story enough. After the events of A Red Peace and Shadow Sun Seven, Jaqi has emerged as a real and potent threat to the Resistance led by John Starfire, and confrontation between the two starts from the first chapter. Ellsworth goes right for the gold in setting up the confrontation without preamble, trusting the readers to get it and go with it. In the meantime, Araskar is also dumped into the deep end. Momentum from the first two books is a precious thing, and the author does not waste a drop.
But not all is what it seems, with a straightforward collision. The novel is more subtle than that. The heart of this book deconstructs, or, alternatively, illuminates aspects of the Resistance, and the Empire and questions hanging in the air since A Red Peace. We get to meet John Starfire’s wife, Aranella, as a force and person in her own right, and she has not quite the same ideas about the future of the galaxy and her husband as one might think. The main thread of her appearance in the narrative is with Araskar. Given that Araskar killed her (and John’s) daughter Rashiya in A Red Peace, this is a rather thorny relationship right from the start, and it adds an additional note of complexity to the story on that level as well. What we have come to understand about the Jorians, the monstrous Shir, John Starfire (and his wife’s motivations) and even the nature of this space opera universe’s history are all called into question.
This novel isn’t quite as gonzo as the first two novels in its invention (although it still is inventive enough by the standards of most series), but it makes up for that in what it does present in the new facets of the universe, and how they all really fit together. This novel cements the world presented in the first two books together. Memory’s Blade, in the end, cuts deep and provides a worthy capstone to the Starfire Trilogy. It fulfills the promise of the previous two volumes in the series to provide an ending to a story in one of the most interesting Space Opera universes of recent years.
