Review: The Vela, Yoon Ha Lee, Becky Chambers, Rivers Solomon, and SL Huang

OOF. Tear my heart into tiny pieces, why don’t you, The Vela writing team?

If you haven’t yet heard about Serial Box, my friends, you are missing a trick. They do serialized fiction — mostly SFF — with some of the most incredible writers working today. The Vela (out tomorrow!) brings together some of my truest new faves from the past few years: Yoon Ha Lee, who wrote Ninefox Gambit; Becky Chambers, who wrote The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet; Rivers Solomon, who wrote An Unkindness of Ghosts; and SL Huang, who wrote Zero Sum Game. Of course, the problem with all of those authors is that they will break your heart. YES EVEN BECKY CHAMBERS. So I should have known what to expect with The Vela.

The sun in Asala Sikou’s solar system is dying, and there is an ever-worsening refugee crisis as people flee from outer planets to inner ones. Sikou takes a job from the Khayyami president to find a missing refugee ship, the Vela, the finding of which will garner political capital for the president. She is accompanied by the president’s child, Niko, an idealistic hacker eager to prove themself to their father. Asala herself is a refugee, sent away from her family (and her sister, Dayo) years ago to save her life, but she insists that this doesn’t affect her view of other refugees. Niko doesn’t really believe her. Also, Niko may be hiding secrets of their own.

tl;dr: I really, really liked The Vela. I expected to, and I did. The authors are doing a lot here, from conflicting character motives to science to political machinations, and the pieces fit together for me almost flawlessly. Serial Box is best enjoyed by accepting the company’s conceptualization of these stories as episodes and seasons of television. Thinking back on the story as a whole, I’m able to separate out the episodes in my mind — the one with all the evil spider robots, the one where they’re traversing the planet and getting help, the Very Climactic One, etc. A lot happens, and you will enjoy it most if you’re not expecting it to be the type of story a book would offer. This is a different kind of storytelling, and I remain delighted by the attempt.

The Vela is, as I mentioned, heartbreaking, and it’s heartbreaking for one of my favorite reasons that a story can be heartbreaking: because there are no good choices. We may love some of these characters more than others (bless Niko’s bunny heart), but they are all working to achieve some version of the least bad outcome. The resources of their world (the sun) are finite, and everyone has to make choices about how they want to see those resources allocated. As Asala and Niko delve deeper into their hunt for the Vela, it becomes more and more clear that the world isn’t what they thought. No matter how firmly committed Asala feels to remaining uncommitted, all the choices available to her put her squarely on the side of some power or other. Her struggles to navigate that are the best part of this story.

My most consistent problem with the Serial Box stories is how often I struggle to connect with the characters. Even when a character has an excellent hook (Asala is a refugee herself and hopes against hope to reconnect with her sister someday so, YOU KNOW, Jenny catnip), there’s something missing in the execution. I don’t know if it’s a question of plural authorship, or a case of the authors having to get through a certain amount of plot in the time allotted, or what. It’s not exactly that Asala or Niko or Soraya feel badly drawn — they don’t — or that I can’t understand their motivations — I absolutely can. Somehow, though, and this has been the case in other Serial Box stories I’ve read, they just don’t feel like fully fleshed out people to me. Make of that what you will.

Like a superb season of television, The Vela leaves us with some plotlines resolved and others wide open. The characters have been shuffled around on the board, and we stand ready to see how their conflicting loyalties and agendas will play out in season two. Of all the Serial Box stories I’ve read thus far, The Vela really does feel the most like a TV season. I’m living for it. I cannot wait for season two. Please subscribe ASAP to up my chances of getting a season two.

Note: I received an ARC of The Vela (by begging for it) for review consideration. This has not impacted the contents of my review. My high level of love for the authors involved, however, probably has.