Queen of Candesce stars the kind of female protagonist that I really like. Venera Fanning starts off as a secondary character in Sun of Suns, the first book in Karl Schroeder’s Virga trilogy. But by the end she’s a major part of the storyline. In this second book, she’s pretty much the only thing going on, besides Virga’s amazing habitats and cultures. Venera Fanning is tough, smart, adaptable, and just enough ruthless and calculating to make things interesting. Which is good because when she lands on Spyre at the beginning of the story, she finds one of the most treacherous parts of Virga both physically for it’s decaying state as well as culturally due to it’s peoples’ insular and untrusting ways.
If you don’t remember Virga from the previous book, it’s a gaseous habitat surrounding an artificial sun floating somewhere in space. The inhabitants live in micro-gravity, but most of them on spinning wheels to give them illusive weight. The sun, Candesce is more than artificial, it’s machine driven. During it’s quiescent periods, humans can cross the 100 miles of space and enter the control rooms even. At the end of Sun of Suns, Venera Fanning did just that. Afterwards, she hung on for dear life as an airbike raced out of Candesce, before it turned back on. Losing one’s grip isn’t so awesome.
This is where Queen of Candesce starts. Venera Fanning is flying
unconscious through space when the first habitat she draws near is Spyre, the largest in Virga and the oldest. It’s an 18 mile long and 12 mile wide cylinder (I may be remembering the dimensions wrong, that’s the benefit of reviewing for myself, I don’t have to go back and look this stuff up), spinning around a traditional set of interlocked habitats known as Lesser Spyre. Spyre’s size creates a vortex of wind that means Venera is bound to land pretty roughly on the inside surface rather than float through the middle as she might with smaller wheels. Luckily, Garth Diamandis (the only other real character in the book) is there with a large net to catch her.
Politically and culturally, Virga is ruled by small nation-states, each comprising at most few spinning wheel towns. Some have small armies and navies. Some have incorporated a few smaller principalities into their own. But by and large Virga is politically what Germany or Italy were in the mid-1800s: lots and lots of small pieces run feudally by petty rulers. Spyre is the same way. Even more so. It’s the only wheel so far that is split between nations. In fact, hundreds of small petty tyrants control a few acres here and there. The largest of these make up a council and they individually control a few square miles on the inner surface of Spyre. They’re even more insular than other nations. Many, perhaps most, will shoot first if you transgress on their acreage. Many have residents who haven’t been seen in centuries. They are only known to be alive by the smoke that issues from their chimneys.
So here’s the plot device designed to build all the story around. Being the Spyre has so much land
, it has products for export to the rest of Virga. Each nation having it’s own particular specialty: cherries and horses figuring prominently from a couple of them in Queen of Candesce. But for some reason, most want to keep a competitive advantage by not revealing what their product is except to customers. And so not only will most shoot first, most will also shoot to keep people from leaving Spyre. Nations and the council guard against emigrants with both passive and active methods. The story is that of Venera Fanning trying to escape Spyre to return to adopted home of Slipstream. But not only do the rulers of Spyre not let people leave, they also know Venera has the Key to Candesce, which would let the possessor control the artificial sun that sustains everyone. Everyone wants her.
I hope I’ve done a pretty good job of describing and selling what Karl Schroeder has done here. The environment is what makes the Virga trilogy. It’s great fun exploring through Schroeder’s eyes the amazing place that is Spyre and Virga. The characters are sometimes a bit clunky. And Schroeder has a tendency to plot in what I am now dubbing predicament-fever
. Throw Venera into one predicament after another and see how she survives. The best parts of this book are not when she is in a predicament of someone else’s doing, but where she’s had a chance to hatch a plan of her own. Wait for it, because it’s a doozy and it’s particularly fun. The situations are a decent, if sometimes clunky, way to showcase the awesomeness that is Virga. Schroeder uses the various predicaments to show various aspects of the physical and cultural lay of the land, from nations that are barely more than fenced in houses, to the gravity, to the preservationists rail lines that move weight to stabilize Spyre, to the decaying nature of Spyre than results in some locations being nearly inaccessible sitting on girders over holes in the structure.
If you haven’t read Sun of Suns, it’s possible to still enjoy Queen of Candesce. The parts that depend on the previous story are explained enough that you won’t need to have read the first book. But like most series books I would recommend reading them in order if you can. You’ll have a more complete understanding and appreciation for the later books. That’s all standard recommendation for series though. The reason why I mention it is because I thought Queen of Candesce was a better book than Sun of Suns. I liked the first one, but the second is nearly blow-me-away fun. I am now eagerly awaiting the arrival of the third book, Pirate Sun.
Title: Queen of Candesce
Author: Karl Schroeder
Cover artist: Stephan Martinière
Series: Virga ; 2
Imprint / publisher: Tor / Holtzbrinck
Format: Hardcover
Length: 332 p.
Publication date: August 2007
ISBN-10: 0-7653-1544-0
ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-1544-1
LC classification: PR9199.3.S269 Q84 2007
