I just finished Elizabeth Moon’s Trading in Danger, which I bought mainly because I picked up Victory Conditions back when the Borders in Columbia, Maryland (where my better half used to drag me while she shopped at Jo-Ann Fabrics) was liquidating.

Victory Conditions didn’t necessarily seem, at first glance, like a sequel, much less the fifth in a series (which it is). After purchasing it, I settled down to make sure I wasn’t jumping ahead and found out that, yes, I would be, should I read it.

Eventually I got around to finding a copy of the first book in the Vatta’s War series, Trading in Danger.

Moon is known for writing ‘military sci fi,’ which, so far as I can tell, is just space opera, though with lots of space battles.

But space opera was exactly what I was looking for. Trading in Danger makes the necessary effort to be either scientifically accurate or at least somewhat realistic in its speculation, but unlike ‘hard’ science fiction, it, like most space opera, is not interested in exploring the scientific and cultural implications of a particular scientific speculation. Arthur C. Clarke tends to write ‘hard’ science fiction, taking a particular conceit and going from there, but with the story primarily focused on that conceit.

Space opera generally just wants to write a cowboys & Indians Saturday pre-movie serial (my parents told me about these), but in space and with laser guns.

I’m okay with this. After all, Star Wars was space opera (George Lucas really didn’t give a flying frog about the societal implications of the first hyperdrive, alien contact, or telekinetic powers, but he cared a lot about fights with laser swords) and Star Wars is one of the great achievements of humankind (for all you children out there, when a grown up says ‘Star Wars‘ he or she means what you call ‘Espisode IV‘ but that’s all wrong and don’t give me that garbage about it being in the credits, I was alive and going to movies in 1977 you were a gleam in the eye of someone too young to even know what sex was, so back off).

You don’t really get to know any of the characters except for the main character, Kylara ‘Ky’ Vatta, but she seems surprisingly well rounded. I couldn’t tell you what made her well rounded, but reading it, I always felt her to be a real, realistic person. That may not sound like much, but a lot of genre fiction features characters who are an unrealistic collection of traits and quirks. Even when she displays that certain hyper-competency endemic of heroes in thrillers, fantasy, sci fi, etc., it somehow manages not to feel strained, as it so often can.

The ‘world’ itself is reasonably interesting. No aliens, just humans. And no galaxy spanning governments either, just independent planets. The only ‘galaxy spanning’ entities are corporate, including banks and the monopoly that controls interstellar communication. Certainly, a set up with a good deal of potential in the follow ups, which I will be reading, though I don’t feel absolutely driven to read them right now.

The story itself is ‘complete,’ i.e., there are no cliffhangers. That said, it was clearly intended to be part of a series. The story of Trading in Danger is hardly epic enough for a standalone novel (though it would do for a short story – not to give the impression that the book feels like a short story drawn out to novelistic lengths, because that is not at all the case), so most readers would guess that the author intended to write a follow up.

So, interesting, well done genre fiction. Fast paced read. Want to read more, but necessarily right now (I mean, I would if the sequel were in front of me, but it’s not and there other books in the queue right now).