3.5
Sun of Suns
ByPublisher Description
It is the distant future. The world known as Virga is a fullerene balloon three thousand kilometers in diameter, filled with air, water, and aimlessly floating chunks of rock. The humans who live in this vast environment must build their own fusion suns and "towns" that are in the shape of enormous wood and rope wheels that are spun for gravity.
Young, fit, bitter, and friendless, Hayden Griffin is a very dangerous man. He's come to the city of Rush in the nation of Slipstream with one thing in mind: to take murderous revenge for the deaths of his parents six years ago. His target is Admiral Chaison Fanning, head of the fleet of Slipstream, which conquered Hayden's nation of Aerie years ago. And the fact that Hayden's spent his adolescence living with pirates doesn't bode well for Fanning's chances . . .
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesSun of Suns Reviews
3.5
“I really didn't like this book. The worldbuilding was weird with space pirates and swashbuckling but in a massive bubble (far larger than Earth) filled with air, water and some land mass all floating around. This bubble was made by a technologically superior race/people/something (not much info there) but instead of finding out about them we follow the people on the inside with swords, guns and torpedoes. This bubble contains some kind of interference to stop technological progress with electronics.
The characters are flat. The protagonist starts ok but quickly becomes purposeless and overly attached to random people he meets. There is a queen/spymaster sort of character but she gets far less prominence later on and little explanation for how she has established her network or her various relationship dynamics. The admiral of the fleet is probably the most interesting but again, quite dull.
We are following a group of space pirates who killed everyone the protagonist ever knew as a child so their desperate plight to save themselves isn't something I was invested in. We later find out the aliens outside the bubble want to make it a utopia but this is bad for some reason. They don't seem to be able to attack the giant bubble in space from the outside which didn't make a lot of sense.
So between the plot, world building and characters being bad it didn't help that the narrator for all these young people's PoVs was an older woman who sounded alternately annoyed or bored at having to read these. She has never narrated any other audiobooks outside of this series that I can find and that doesn't surprise me.
All in all, would not recommend.”
“4.5 stars, https://reviews.metaphorosis.com/review/sun-of-suns-karl-schroeder/
<strong>Summary </strong>
In the weird gaseous sphere of Virga, towns and cities are loose conglomerations of linked structures floating far from the world's central sun. Hayden is in his teens when his parents die in a failed attempt to break free off oppressive invaders by lighting their own renegade sun. As an older and more mature young man, he still harbors plans of revenge, but the world is much more complicated than he'd envisioned.
<strong>Review </strong>
I can’t remember where or when I picked up <em>Sun of Suns</em>, but I know that I’d read Schroeder’s novel <em>Ventus</em> (which I thought was promising, but slow), that <em>Sun of Suns</em> was one of the early e-books I got, and that it was in my library by 2010 at the latest. I recall enjoying it quite a bit, but for some reason didn’t carry on to the rest of the series. So when I saw some of those on sale recently, I picked them up.
On this second reading, I liked <em>Sun of Suns</em> just as much as on the first go-round. It’s innovative, with engaging characters and a solid plot. I have a few quibbles here and there, but I really enjoyed the story. I’d had a few concerns about buying the series in bulk, as it were – that often doesn’t end well – but so far so good, and I’m keen to finally go on to the other books.
Schroeder doesn’t just set out an unusual and intriguing setting, he’s careful to lay the trail for more surprises and innovation to come. I’m genuinely curious to find out what comes next. A very solid SF story, and one I recommend.”
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