Monday, March 15, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Vela: Salvation by Ashley Poston, Maura Milan, Nicole Givens Kurtz, and Sangu Mandanna

 



The Vela was one of the latest offerings from Serial Box Publishing, a publisher of SF/F and other genre stories in serialized weekly forms, in both print and audio.  The first season, which I reviewed here, was a space opera-ish story written by some of the most acclaimed writers in the genre today - SL Huang, Yoon Ha Lee, Becky Chambers, and Rivers Solomon - and dealt with some really interesting issues like refugees, climate change, nationalism, etc.  It was mainly held back by Serial Box's trademark episodic formula and its cliffhanger ending, but I did enjoy the main characters and how it explored its interesting world. 

For The Vela's second season, Salvation, the publisher opted unusually not to bring back the original cast of authors but instead featured a new set of less well known authors: Ashley Poston, Maura Milan, Nicole Givens Kurtz, and Sangu Mandanna.  I've read three of these four (I haven't yet read Poston) and have really enjoyed these authors, even if they aren't quite as well known as their predecessors, so I was interested to see where they'd take the story after its cliffhanger ending.  Alas, the result is kind of disappointing, with the story not really dealing with as many interesting themes as its first season, featuring aa greater lack of cohesion between episodes, and a story that seems designed due to editorial mandate to wrap things up in a tight bow that just feels inappropriate for where things started.  The main characters are still really enjoyable and there's still some interesting stuff here - and audio narrator Robin Miles is always a treat to listen to - but it just doesn't live up to the potential of the first season.

-------------------------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------------
The wormhole has closed, and the Vela and a few ships have managed to go through, leaving the solar system behind.  And for Niko, that means they too have been left behind - by some of the refugees they tried to help escape and more painfully by Asala, who seemed to kill their father and jet away, leaving them to die as the system's sun expires.  Niko desperately searches for any path for survival in the remnants of Uzochi's research and hits upon two key discoveries: the coordinates of the system to where the Vela has traveled and a left-behind scientist, with a technology that could change everything.  

But on the other side of the wormhole, things are not exactly going as planned.  When Asala brought her sister Dio through the wormhole, she thought she was saving Dio from freezing and was going to take them to a new life together, like old times.  But Dio, now known as Hana, had established her own family - a wife and two kids - back on Gan Da and wants only to go back to them...and as the ranking Gandesian to get through the wormhole, she plans to use the fleet's resources to find a way back to their old system...dying or not.  

Hoping her sister will changer her mind, Asala heads down to the new planet, known as "Salvation", hoping to help them establish a new home there that will tempt Hana/Dio back to her side.  But what she finds on Salvation is a world not quite as perfect as Uzochi had promised, with its own environment that might not be too accepting of its new human visitors......
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The Vela: Salvation features once again Asala and Niko as its main characters, although other characters such as Hana and Uzochi get significant portions told from their point of view.  Now that the Vela has traveled to a new system, issues such as climate change and refugees are not really explored; instead we deal with issues such as humans exploring a foreign environment and more prominently the hurt that comes from leaving people behind in a fashion that seems irreversible, even if such a move is in theory better off for those people.  And again we deal with issues of sacrifices, willing or not, for the common good.  

Alas, those themes aren't really explored very well.  Hana is the key to exploring such themes, and the character with the most interesting potential - she was a former refugee of a dying world, taken in by a colonizer nationalist planet and converted to their culture and developed her own new life as a result.  Which is brutal for Asala, who was her old family in her first culture....but also brutal for Hana, as she has no way of really understanding Asala and at the same time has been torn from the family she has built over the last few decades - the new ones she loves - by this remnant of her past...without her consent.  It's a potentially pretty tragic story - especially as it means Hana is in this new world without her new family and with the last member of her old family who doesn't quite understand her new life... but it gets lost in Asala and Niko's storyline...and then the story decides to go in a direction to quickly resolve Asala and Hana's conflict through what is essentially magic and then ties up Hana's loss of her family in a way to provide an easy happy ending to avert any hard questions.  

The same is true of issues with the planet and with the people left behind, and with Professor Uzochi, whose former character as a refugee scientist who came from a world destroyed by capitalist-caused climate change is replaced here with a megalomaniacal mad scientist who is desperate to prove her genius no matter the cost, believing any sacrifice is acceptable for the greater good.  This provides the season with a clear antagonist that works sure....but it's hard to see why anyone would want to follow her, and a large part of the climactic confrontation relies upon Uzochi convincing a large number of people to follow her, and it's never really believable, and it weakens the moral dilemmas faced by the characters. 

Where the season still works is with Niko and Asala, who are still highly enjoyable characters - Asala's stubborn pushing forward despite how much guilt she feels is easy to empathize with, even as it's clear she's in denial, and that contrasts with Niko, who feels betrayed and yet guilty themself given their role in everything, and who finds new reasons to live in an underdeveloped but really successful romance. The series has some issues with its episodic structure, but it still manages to use it to give both of the main characters their own highly successful adventures that are both interesting and sometimes horrifying (Asala's verge purely into horror in particular), even if they don't make much sense if you stop to think about them much. 

Still, even more than the first season, The Vela has issues with its episodic structure.  The timeline of events doesn't really make sense, with there clearly being a 3 month time jump at some point in Asala's story where she's sending samples up to Uzochi that never seems to match up with what Asala is doing when we see her.  More problematically, the episodic structure means that we leave characters for episodes at a time - particularly Hana - only for them to face major character shifting decisions the next time we see them, and so the character development and events necessary for those decisions to make sense frequently aren't there.  And the story wraps up in a way that uses again what is basically magic to give everyone a happy story, and in a series that tackled hard no-win questions of climate change, refugees, and nationalism and capitalism, it's kind of unsatisfying and makes little sense here. 

So yeah, even with the new cast of writers who have a decent track record, if not the acclaim of its first season's writers, the Vela: Salvation just doesn't fulfill the series' promise as I'd hoped.  Alas.  

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