Wednesday, February 20, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: A Matter of Oaths by Helen S. Wright




A Matter of Oaths is an interesting story in terms of its place in the genre - it's an LGBTQ friendly Space Opera with a PoC main character that was published in 1988, when such a thing was pretty unheard of.  In a way it can be seen as a SF equivalent to Swordspoint (by Ellen Kushner), but unlike that classic, A Matter of Oaths went largely unnoticed.  But it was rereleased in 2017 with a preface by Becky Chambers and a number of authors I like have shouted it out, so I was interested in seeing how it worked today, when these type of stories are, while not common, certainly no longer unusual.

The answer for me at least is that A Matter of Oaths is a solid Space Opera story, with a trio of really strong main characters, and an outline of a plot otherwise that is a bit more bare-bones than I would have liked.  There's a lot of interesting ideas here in this universe, and for better or for worse the story is mainly more interested in exploring the relationships between characters as they struggle to survive and figure out themselves.  But those relationships are really well done, which makes this a very solid book, even if it never really became more than that for me.


-----------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------
Rallya is the Commander of the Bhattya a Guild patrolship with the need for a new "First," the First Officer right below the Ship's "Three" who run the ship's operations, systems, and command.  But when she looks for a candidate, the only one She, her Webmaster Joshim, and Captain Vidar can find is a man named Rafe.  Rafe is clearly highly skilled and qualified, but for one thing:

Rafe's memory was wiped because he was an Oath-Breaker, in a universe where Oath-Breaking - to either the Guild (which controls the use of Webbing, the VR-like technology that controls ship and station operation) or either of the universe's two competing Empires (each ruled by an immortal Emperor) - is the ultimate sin.  Very few crewmembers will trust an oath-breaker, even if Rafe can't remember anything about what he actually did.  But Rafe's capabilities are too good to ignore, and Rallya has always had a thing against following conventions.

And Rafe proves to be an exemplary First, with clear talent for command, as if he was a commander in his former life.  And he even begins a relationship with Joshim, with the attraction being deep.  Yet when Rafe begins remembering glimpses of his past, it becomes clear that he may not have been an oath-breaker after all - but someone with clear importance in his past life, who was wiped illegally to cover it all up.  And whoever Rafe was, someone has been keeping an eye on him, willing to do anything, even something lethal, to prevent Rafe's secrets from ever coming back to light....but what those people could not have anticipated is the lengths Rallya and her crew are willing to go to do what's right.
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A Matter of Oath is really the story of three characters: Rallya, Rafe, and Joshim, and the story is told from their own points of view.  And they're all tremendously strong characters, particularly Rallya and Rafe.  The rest of this setting is rather interesting - it's a universe with two competing Empires and a Guild that controls interactions between them with oaths binding them to each other (hence the title) and those oaths are truly paramount.  There's a lot that can be done with such a setting, and I'd really have loved to read more about how this all works and how it came to be, but the book isn't really interested in that.

Fortunately, again, Rallya, Rafe, and Joshim are fantastic characters.  Rallya is the classic sarcastic strong willed intelligent heroine, but her combination of wit, willingness to be humble at times, and perceptiveness make her a fantastic character as the lead of much of this story.  She has just the right amount of righteous anger, self-confidence, and ability to see what is happening around behind the surface to be very interesting to read without seeming like a new incarnation of Sherlock Holmes.  Rafe's troubled personality, stemming from his own self-dislike due to what he thinks at first is a mind-wipe for oath breaking and his discomfort at finding out things about himself he didn't know, makes him very easy also to root for and to follow, and really just in the end to be happy.  Joshim is the least major of the main trio, but his capability and fears of bias make him again another strong addition to the cast.  And the relationship between Rafe and Joshim is wonderfully done, this is not a romance novel in any form and it's certainly not a long drawn-out relationship, but it's incredibly believable and easy to understand (with one sex scene of note, if those bother you).

The story doesn't take too many predictable turns, and when it does, Rallya sees them coming nearly as quickly as the reader, which helps quite a bit - the book avoids the annoying trope where the reader is expecting something and the characters all stumble around in the dark, which I hate.  And it ends in a particularly strong fashion, with the final realization by Rallya at the very end being pretty damn perfect.

That said, what keeps the book from being truly among my favorites is how everything outside of the main characters is kind of bare bones and bends to the wills of the characters and story.  How exactly do the two Empires work and what are their differences - and why do people live in one Empire over the other?  How did the emperors become immortal in the first place and are they the only ones?  What exactly are the interactions between humans and aliens and what does it mean for Rafe to be a hybrid?  These are just some of the questions I had about the setting that the book brought up, and the book has no interest in exploring them.  I'm not sure how the book could've done better in this regard - but the book has interludes between each chapter with background information and I suspect it could've fed these things into those parts without losing much of the pacing.  Alas, it was not to be.

Still, definitely a solid book, and for a book of its time it was definitely worth being noted.  But in the modern day where such books are becoming more prevalent, I'm not sure A Matter of Oaths is necessarily worth hunting down over some others.
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