The Dark Between The Stars by Kevin J. Anderson

I will, some day, read all of the Hugo nominees for Best Novel. I'm slightly over 50% done, and now that I'm voting each year, that means that I'm not losing ground to new nominees. I pick from here and there in the history of the award, and eventually I'll get there. So of course, that meant I came to one of the years where the nominations were gamed by certain groups that shall go unnamed. And this was one of the books that definitely made it on to the nomination lists because of that.

So I read it, with not a small amount of cynicism. And my verdict is, like with the Jim Butcher that got nominated the year after (or before?), that they're both fine, they're just not, in any way, great. There's nothing about them that makes me jump up and down and say "now this needs to be nominated."  Nothing that is "this is new and innovative," or even "I couldn't put this damn book down." It's just...fine. If you want a really really long space-bound story, this would be fine. (I like to reserve "space opera" to mean something more than just "story that takes place in space.") If you want vast casts of not-particularly-well-developed characters, this would be fine. If you have very little attention span and want chapters that rarely break five pages, this would be fine.

That's one thing that does bug me. Here, Anderson is falling prey to the James Patterson School of Writing, which is the idea that chapters need to be extremely short. All the time, not just to break up a flow. With so many characters, and not much to differentiate them outside of short descriptors (concerned father, ambitious overbearing mother, wife of the emperor, loyal son of king, cranky son of king, etc., etc.), it took me a long time to get a handle on the story. Of course, it does sound like I'm not exactly coming in at the beginning, but the book, for all its emphasis on short chapters, did not give me much time to catch up.

It's a story of, well, corporate malfeasance, loners in space, space plagues, killer robots, a blackness in space that wants to kill all sentient life (I was having major Babylon 5 flashbacks), compy resettlement programs, children at school, heirs dying of mysterious diseases, other royal children going off into the wilderness to find themselves, a disease-obsessed rich woman, the withholding of miracle cures, and...I mean, I could go on and on. Every time I paused in writing that last sentence, I remembered another plotline.

This really is less sprawling and more unfocused. But I'm sounding more critical than I want to. I mean, this is fine. It's a solid three stars. For all its length, I didn't mind reading it, but goodness, there was nothing that made me want to read it again! Neither am I eager to find the next in the series...but I enjoyed it enough that if it crossed my path, I would pick it up. I wasn't angry at it.

(Well, okay, sometimes some of the female characters got under my skin, not to mention the son who wanted to demand of his mother that she agree that when she was systematically raped during wartime to create babies, it was a good thing, which, WHAT THE FUCK? What is this even doing here? Trying to make all your women readers uncomfortable? Or just the author not realizing how intense that is to be a brief conversation that is never mentioned again? It's...not good. You want to have that shit as a plotline, it better fucking not be a throw-away, and you'd better have something new and empathetic to fucking say.)

So, yeah. If you like a certain kind of space-centred story, and you want big and sprawling and interconnected, this is fine. Except for all the things that bugged me. But it only rarely made me angry, and so...read it if you want? A Hugo nominee, though? Really?