I'm reading the Stardrifter series by David Collins-Rivera, and reviewing each book as I finish it. The second novel in the series is Street Candles and it's one of the most intense and emotionally taxing things I've read in a long time. This review contains no spoilers beyond what you'd read on the back cover of the book.
You know how in sci fi, rebels stand up to the evil empire, and through persistent struggle and indefatigable resolve they overthrow their oppressors, and ewoks celebrate and credits roll? It's such a common storyline in sci fi that it sometimes seems like it's hard to find sci fi that's NOT about that. Street Candles is a book about rebellion and persistent struggle and oppression, and it's nothing at all like the other ones you've seen or read. David's version of the evil empire is one where the rebels and the government are two different sides of evil empire, except there are three sides because in rebellions there are often factions that find conflict in the power vacuum they create. Street Candles isn't really a story about the rebels or the government being overthrown, though. It's a story, of course, about the ordinary people doing ordinary things in the background, and whose everyday actions sometimes affect a whole planet. Or, more importantly, the life of one person
The first part of the story is classic Stardrifter space opera stuff. Ejoq is in a bind because his finances are being transferred from one bank to another, or something like that, and so he desperately needs work. He gets a job interview, he aces it, he joins the small crew of the GRIZZELDA, and they depart for a routine cruise to the planet Barlow. Their passengers are a news crew with a cheeseball reporter and the odd assortment of producers and camera operators. It's an easy gig, at least in theory. Shuttle the reporters to Barlow, chill out while they get their footage, and then shuttle them back home. What could go wrong?
The GRIZZELDA has 10 crew members including Ejoq. The last thing the ship owners (the senior officers of the crew) expect is to run into space combat, so having gunnery onboard is mostly an insurance policy. For that reasons, Ejoq has little to do all day, at least in theory, so part of his responsibilities are KP and steward to the passengers. In addition to that, though, he finds that the previous gunnery operator was maybe not as experienced as he could have been, and the ship's weapons systems are pretty much in shambles. So he spends every day literally catering to the passengers and overhauling the weapons computers.
This section of the story level-sets for what normal is like. It's a little like Motherload part 2. Shipboard life, troubleshooting systems, making up for other people's incompetence. I enjoyed this part because I identify strongly with it. Every early IT job I had was exactly this story. You walk into the literal closet where the previous IT Guy kept the servers only to find outdated software, a rat's nest of cabling, systems tenuously tethered together to serve legacy requirements used by that one grumpy person in the finance department, and also the CEO's printer is out of ink and so that's your top priority. This is comforting sci fi.
There's a lot more to it than just that, though. There are personal relationships, most of them bad or unhealthy, because Ejoq isn't always a very likable character. Sometimes you just want to punch him yourself, tell him to grow up or else just communicate better. But you can't fault him for one thing, and that's doing his dang job. He does that, and he does it thoroughly, and he does it smartly. He knows what technology can do, and he doesn't tolerate not using it.
This extends, I think, to how he looks at life, and I think that's what the first part of the book is telling us. Ejoq sees how things can be, how they're supposed to be and, when push comes to shove, he doesn't tolerate it when stupidity gets in the way of obvious efficiency.
Is it any wonder us computer geeks identify with this series?
The bulk of the story happens on the planet of Barlow. This review is free of spoilers, so I can't write down the running commentary that was going on in my head as I progressed past page after page, heading deeper and deeper into a hell of civil war that I did not want to read about but that I also couldn't stop reading. There's a palpable contrast between Barlow and the safety of the GRIZZELDA, and the farther you journey on the planet surface, the more you long to be back in outer space far from human brutality.
And that's no accident.
In the universe of Stardrifter, space is a kind of limbo realm. It's not perfect, it's not free from strife or politics or religion, but there's a kind of functional balance to it. You can go from station to station, ship to ship, system to system, and because there's more void than people, you get a lot of respite away from the problems humans manage to perpetually generate. There are pirates to worry about, gangsters, political factions, but they're encounters you have and solve and then leave behind. On the surface of a planet, though, there's no escape. You're in a bubble with the worst of humanity and there's no leaving it behind.
There are tiny sparks of light that happen on the surface of a planet, though. They're like street candles in the darkness, and they're the people you connect with. (That's not what the book title refers to, by the way, but I'm intentionally re-framing the term.) On the planet, Ejoq meets a whole host of characters who change the course of his life there on Barlow, and frankly are likely to change your life too. I know Cyndra and Mayli and Eyr'jee and Benle. I'm pretty sure I've talked to Stenn Mathers online. These are, like, real people.
They're not, of course, real people. They're fictional characters in the Stardrifter universe, but you'll see them out of the corner of your eye some night. You'll be haunted by these souls. And they're beautiful souls to be haunted by. They're like stars in the emptiness of space, except that instead of being surrounded by blissful emptiness they're surrounded by a hell of humanity's own creation.
Ejoq doesn't make the hell of Barlow go away. He doesn't fix Barlow the way he repaired his gunnery closet. In fact, if anything he's broken by it. He leaves Barlow a clinically depressed and traumatized, unwilling veteran of war.
You won't feel much different than Ejoq does by this point in the book. It's a journey, and you'll have seen and experienced a world you'll feel like you've loved and lost. But you, like Ejoq, gain insight into the way humanity functions, or fails to function. Unlike Ejoq, you probably don't have a spaceship to retreat back to. But I'm not sure David Collins-Rivera means for the reader to be entirely bound to Ejoq for sympathy. There are other heroes in Street Candles you can compare yourself to. There are people on Barlow who don't get to pick up and leave at the end of Act 2. There's Stenn Mathers and Delman ffolkes, people who do amazing things in the book but aren't named Ejoq so we overlook them as the "heroes" of the story.
And there are aspects of people like Commissioner Harq Vernes, Paolo, and Tahc'r that the reader can likely identify with on some level. People make choices, like we all do in real life, and they're hard choices. Maybe not the right choices, but then again maybe not the wrong choice either. Was Tahc'r wrong for what he did? Or is he only wrong because what he does is opposite of what Ejoq wants?
This book will do your head in.
By the end of the story, some normalcy is restored to your Stardrifter universe. Maybe not as much as you want. I definitely wanted a "nicer" ending. I wanted Kirk and Spock and McCoy to gather around the captain's chair, make a quip about humans being illogical but fundamentally good after all, laugh, and zip back across the stars. That's not the kind of ending you get in this book, but it's also not the ending you get on New's Year Eve every year.
This isn't just a good book. It's a great book that tells a nuanced and complex story, and you just won't be able to put it down. And you'll never really close the book, I think, not while you read it and not after you've read it. You should buy it and read it!