Dr. Sunya Song is an expert at teasing information out of ancient archives. She has travelled long and far to an exotic location to do just that, surviving an attack by pirates along the way, only to discover that her wife and their two children have unexpectedly arrived before her, as a surprise. Sunya is very surprised and actually quite dismayed, because they came on a ship piloted by a treacherous former lover and professional rival, who seems bent on both undermining Sunya professionally and stealing the affections of her teenage daughter. Then someone poisons a member of their expedition, Sunya is attacked and injured, and their host asks her to do some sleuthing to try and discover who is behind the attacks. Oh, the pirates are still circling, and the dilapidated habitation where they’re staying also seems to be haunted!
Is it just me, or is Elizabeth Bear’s third entry in her White Space series actually a cozy mystery? One that just happens to be wrapped up in a dramatic and far-ranging space opera? That’s overstating it a little bit, of course, but Bear says as much in the acknowledgments: “… often I thought I had bitten off more than I could chew trying to meld a family drama with a first-contact novel and a space opera, with a smidgen of murder mystery thrown in for seasoning.”
Let’s backtrack in case you haven’t read the first two books in Bear’s White Space, Ancestral Night and Machine. It’s a future universe where most humans long ago fled an uninhabitable Earth and were welcomed in by a galactic confederation known as the Synarche whose members are “systers.” The Synarche is based near the Milky Way’s core, but they have a type of FTL drive that folds White Space around a ship allowing it to essentially cross the galaxy in the space of a few months. Some of their tech has been cribbed from a vanished civilization they call the Koregoi — possibly including this White Space drive, though I’m not entirely clear on that.
Most everyone in the Synarche is highly modified in some ways, with implants that connect them with information webs and other beings, as well as what Bear calls “foxes” that help them regulate emotions, neuroses, and pathologies. But those pirates? They’re called Freeporters and they reject all of those internal modifications, though they’re happy to use Koregoi tech such as anti-grav and cloaking.
Sunya has been assigned to travel to a red dwarf called the Baostar that is about to go supernova. It is surrounded by Koregoi tech in the form of a sentient archive that the Synarche is just learning how to communicate with, and that’s where Sunya comes in. She’s tasked with communicating with the Baostar, all the while a small fleet of ships is ferrying away as many parts of it as can be saved before the star explodes.
Some online reviews of Machine griped about its long, slow setup, and even I mentioned it, though not disparagingly. Not in The Folded Sky. By the end of Chapter 3, barely 30 pages into the ebook version, the you-know-what hits the fan and Dr. Song finds herself in the middle of a deep-space battle to the death with Freeporters. The pirates have the Baostar system hub blockaded; they want to stop the rescue operation and also kidnap as many humans as possible, especially children. Such as Sunya and her wife Salvie’s pre-teen son Stavan and teen daughter Luna. (Salvie, by the way, is a syster species called Fercho, and she’s never fully described, but we learn that she has tentacles and a set of compound as well as simple eyes. Their children are fully human, having been borne by Sunya.)
Elizabeth Bear is one of a current crop of genre authors who are enlarging SFF’s boundaries. Her strategy in White Space is to focus in on rather ordinary folks caught up in larger forces. In the domestic arrangements and the plotlines of a woman in space, I’m reminded a bit of Mary Robinette Kowal’s “Lady Astronaut” series. But Sunya is hunkered down in her quarters mentally riffling through ancient archives with her wife and kids and cats, not seated in the commander’s chair on the bridge of a starship. When the Freeporters attack the ship she’s on, she’s confined to quarters as the ship pitches, yaws and sharply accellerates. But when her own family is threatened during an attack on the Station, she doesn’t hesitate to leap into action.
Sunya’s dealing with some past traumas and though she’s extremely good at what she does, she has trouble believing in herself. The attempted murders, the unstable star, the nasty pirates are all something like McGuffins that move the plot along as we root for Sunya to survive long enough to gain confidence in herself.
This is as much a psychological personal drama as a space opera. It’s not Louis Wu celebrating his 200th birthday with a globe-hopping party, it’s a person with real trauma and deep insecurities doing her best to function in an unfriendly universe. The Folded Sky has lots of SF elements but in the final analysis it’s a personal and domestic drama that cares more about personal growth than intergalactic conflicts. Sunya is such a bundle of neuroses at the beginning that she was hard to like. But by the end, I was rooting for her not only to survive, but to start to like and trust herself.
(Simon & Schuster/Saga Press, 2025)
