Book Review: Black Sails to Sunward

Lesbian Aubrey-Maturin IN SPACE

My friend and frequent blog reader Sheila Jenné has published her first novel, Black Sails to Sunward. I understand at this point in reviews you’re supposed to say “I received a free copy in exchange for my honest review” but I did not. I had to pay for my copy like a plebeian.

I go through my reading life with a number of extremely specific cravings. Some I can completely satisfy, as you can tell from the dozens of FLDS memoirs on my Kindle. Some I have occasionally found examples of but still long for more, like slice-of-life science fiction. And some I have never been able to meet, like a post-apocalyptic novel that has no fighting and only information about farming techniques. Every time someone tells me that there is a lot of farming information in this one I read it and we have like one chapter about farming and then people are killing each other for the rest of the book.

Black Sails to Sunward satisfies a particular long-unmet craving of mine, which is “the Regency period IN SPACE.” If you too are pining after Jo Walton’s cancelled novel Poor Relations, perhaps Black Sails to Sunward will satisfy.

There are two kinds of Regency period novels, and Black Sails to Sunward is the Aubrey-Maturin kind: all honor and sails and prizes captured in battle, rum and sodomy and the lash, the conflict between your conscience and your duty, the dangerous beauty of the wild wide-open stars. I will note for Aubrey-Maturin fans that Patrick O’Brian’s characteristic values dissonance is nearly totally absent. The protagonist, Lucy Prescott, is far from being a 21st century progressive but her views are well within the 21st century Anglosphere’s Overton window.

For a novel that runs entirely on aesthetics, the science is remarkably well-justified. I cackled when I found out the explanation for why this spacefaring civilization doesn’t use electricity (it is fantastic). Carefully chosen details make the setting feel real. People who spend too long in zero gravity without exercising are “spacebound” and can no longer survive on planets. The original Mars colonists were more likely than average to be autistic because we know exactly who is going to leave their homes to try to terraform Mars, so on Mars autistic traits are normalized among the gentry and high-support-needs autism is referred to as “the noble’s condition.”¹

Jenné is careful to avoid easy answers. Earth and Mars are fighting a war; neither planet is wholly good and neither is wholly evil. Prescott regularly finds herself in dilemmas where no matter what she does she will give up on something she holds sacred. Instead of taking a third answer, she often just has to pick the option she dislikes least—and it’s never clear whether she chose rightly. Moral injury is a major theme, and it is sensitively and thoughtfully handled, without erasing the humanity of either victim or perpetrator.

I did not especially enjoy the romance arc. Prescott and her love interest, Moira, are mostly kept apart by legitimate political disagreements. Otherwise, they resolve their conflicts well through communication. While the couple are clearly attracted to each other, the book isn’t especially horny: not once did I get a page of anguished internal monologue about hands brushing against each other. This is not what I want out of a romance. I want people with zero self-awareness or communication skills getting into clusterfucks so complicated that it takes me twenty minutes to explain them to my long-suffering husband. Also, I want embarrassing sex dreams and losing your train of thought because your love interest smiled. And boobs.

However, I know a bunch of people who want more emotional maturity and fewer boobs in romance, and if this suits then Black Sails to Sunward has both of those things.

Also, sextants! There are sextants. People are traveling in space, with spaceships, and navigating with sextants. It’s fantastic.

1. The nonverbal autistic character is a delight.