Posted by This is another recommendation read!! I’ve had this author’s book sitting on my TBR forever. There are just too many things to read. But, a recommendation has bumped it to the top of the list and so here we are.
I enjoyed this from the start. I love first contact stories. I love bears. I love the idea of space bears even more. I quickly got Deep Space Nine vibes since the setting is a space station near a worm hole. The worm hole has also recently been the vector of a first contact experience, opening for the first time in tens of thousands of years or more.
Enter space bears, aka the Ursans.
The main character is named Rohan, he’s a human hybrid with an alien species which has turned him into a superhero kind of character. For instance, he can tow a spaceship to a dock, but he’s fairly low key in his personality…at first. I like the fact that usually he’s not full of himself, although his Jekyll and Hyde personality becomes more apparent as the book progresses. He’s tried to leave a violent past behind, but we all know how that goes.
This book actually kind of goes in a loop. We start with a scene of Rohan getting the ever loving shit kicked out of him. He’s being threatened with death, and he’s thinking to himself he deserves it, and he admits as much to his attackers. Since he’s so super powerful you get the hint that the people kicking the shit out of him are even more overpowered. Before he’s killed the story then cuts to “12 days earlier” and you learn all about the events that lead up to this ass kicking.
It’s easy to forget how the book started since it’s so different from the meat of the book. For me, it served as a hook since while reading about him he doesn’t strike me as someone that would be deserving of an execution. He seems to be a decent guy — so what happened? We find out.
So, Rohan’s father is an alien from the race known as the il’Drach. They are the species that rules the empire that controls most of known/explored space (at least from a human’s perspective). The only systems that haven’t come under the empire’s rule are backwater planets without resources to be worth conquering the planet for. It’s here where Rohan decides to make a home on the space station Wistful. He works as a tower for ships, bringing them in by hand. He yanks around space ships for a living which is pretty neat. The space station is full of other alien races and they seem to coexist mostly peacefully and respectfully. Again, a bit of Star Trek vibes here. The station also orbits a planet with some serious mega-fauna that will fuck your shit up. It’s basically uninhabitable and is part of the reason why the empire hasn’t bothered with it. Yes, there are fight scenes involving insanely large mega creatures.
So, shit starts to go wrong for Rohan when the space bears show up, but it’s not really their fault. They come through the worm hole as refugees, they’ve taken a lot of damage and are asking for help. They look exactly like bears from earth, they’re just in space. This presents a problem because NOW the empire is going to be interested, and it could have consequences for Rohan.
Wistful is the name of the space station, it’s sentient, and that’s not unusual. The ships and space centers of this world are almost always sentient, and they find it super strange that the Ursans (bear people) have ships like ours that may have rudimentary AI but are not at all sentient. Wistful is a bit of a mystery though because no one knows how old it is. It’s almost like it’s always been there, for tens of thousands of years. In that way I get a little bit of Mass Effect vibes, there’s tech left over from species and generations long, long forgotten.
There are a ton of overpowered fight scenes, training scenes, sparring scenes but they’re intermixed with character development and slower parts so it actually had really good pacing. I don’t tend to enjoy fight scenes, I’ve said that, like, a bunch of times over the course of my reviewing/blogging. However, I didn’t just tolerate the fight scenes but I enjoyed most of them in this book — fancy that. Good thing, too, since there were a bunch of them. A lot of them. This book had a lot of fight scenes. So, a bit of a content warning, this book can get graphic and includes things considered war crimes, including child death and trauma.
So, there were a few things that didn’t totally work for me, but this is just my opinion so understand your mileage may vary. There’s a really dark scene towards the end of the book, it involves a lot of trauma, a a lot of death, just a ton of violence and it’s meant to be super emotional. However, the character seems to get over it pretty fast. Like, really fast. He sits on it for a few scenes and then seems to go back to normal by the end of the book. One of the other things was how often other characters in the book told Rohan how great/kind/merciful/generous he is. In some instances it made sense, Rohan would spare a life and it wouldn’t necessarily be what others would do, and now the person he spared is like wtf? A thank you would be expected, maybe a little dialogue to understand why. But often these turned into drawn out discussions between the character and Rohan. If it had happened once or twice I wouldn’t have noticed, but it was a pretty common occurrence. It’d be more effective, for me, to let the actions speak for themselves most of the time.
There’s a pretty large romance subplot in this one. As I’ve said many times I’m not usually a fan of romance so if I bounce off of it, maybe don’t read too much into that unless I point out something specific I think is poorly done or toxic or whatever. This is one of those cases where there’s nothing wrong with the romance, in fact it’s very mature, healthy, respectful, I just didn’t connect with it. That happens a lot with me, so. Grain of salt.
I really enjoyed all the different familiar elements combined into a new product. It almost felt nostalgic and yet it was new to me. It was an interesting experience that’s only happened to me a few other times with authors like Michael Sullivan and T. Kingfisher. I also enjoyed the light humor and banter that was scattered throughout the book. The pacing was great and it slowed where it needed to slow and sped up where it needed to speed up to keep me going from start to finish quickly.
I’d say the audience for this book would be those who want a fast paced super hero sci-fi featuring first contact with space bears.