Welcome to the A Pale Light in the Black reread! I'll be taking a break from reviews on Saturdays to try something different - a multi-part reread of a recent SciFi book I really enjoyed, KB Wagers' A Pale Light in the Black (which I reviewed here). The idea here, as demonstrated on many other blogs with many other books across the internet, is to reread the book a few chapters at a time, going over my thoughts on what's going on at each point in time. Hopefully a few of you will buy the book and read along with me, and put forth your own responses in the comments.
So a question I suspect a lot of you would be asking is this: Why this book? It's certainly not a high profile title, and even if I enjoyed it a lot, it's not one of the books I've rated with a perfect score demonstrating it as an absolute must read. But well, in an world that has rightfully seen all sporting events canceled for the foreseeable future, to say nothing of a global pandemic and a botched response from incompetent and/or malevolent government leaders, I wanted a book with two particular characteristics:
1. It includes some form of sporting events; and
2. It's optimistic, featuring people coming together as family and friends to do good in the world.
And that's A Pale Light in the Black in a nutshell - a book about a future world in which the world has recovered from an unspecified 21st century collapse to become, by 4 centuries later, a more optimistic and healthy one toward people of all kinds (races, sexes, sexualities, etc.) and features a space version of the Coast Guard - the Near-Earth Orbital Guard (the NeoG). Even better, a large portion of the plot deals with a NeoG crew bonding and trying, among their other duties, to prepare for and win a major mostly-athletic competition against other military services - the Boarding Games. The Result its a fun and optimistic book featuring a cast of characters its hard not to love, a future that I think we could all wish might happen, and a sporting event that we would all love to be able to watch on our TVs. Perfect for this time here and now.
I'm going to go over at least 2 chapters in every post in this reread after this one, possibly doing 3 chapters (we'll see as we go along), so if you are following along, you don't need to read that quickly through the book to keep up. A quick note on that by the way: I actually read this book through an Advance Reader Copy, which is not the final edition that was published. 99.9% of the book in my copy will be the same as the final copy, but one difference I expect is that only some of the chapters are titled by Chapter #, so it's possible my numbered Chapter and the ones in the final book don't quite match. Anyhow let's get right into it:
Chapter 1: Sol Year 2435, One Day Post-Boarding Games
Quick Summary: Commander Rosa Martin Rivas is trying to bear the disappointment of just barely losing at the Boarding Games to Commander Carmichal's Navy team, but can't help but blame herself. But as the commander of the NeoG Interceptor team Zuma's Ghost, it falls on her to refocus her team:
"I know, We don't lose out there, though, right? What are we?"
"The NeoG." The Automatic reply echoed back from everyone, and this time Rosa's smile was genuine.
"That's right. Don't forget it."
Thoughts: And we're off, with what's basically a prologue, as we begin just after our main characters' last Boarding Games, where they came oh so close to winning but still fell short. We still don't know really anything about what the Boarding Games are, but from the dating of the chapter and this prologue, we can tell they're going to be a major focus of the plot and that Rosa is going to be desperate to make up for what she feels is her own fault.
Still, it's a super short chapter, and there's little of substance here other than foreshadowing. Join me next time, as we get into more of the meat of the story, as the NeoG and Zuma's Ghost is put into action boarding a lost ship.....
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