The Vela: The Complete Season 1 by Yoon Ha Lee, Becky Chambers, Rivers Solomon, S. L. Huang

Still catching up on things read last fall.

This book was written in some rotation, with each author doing a
chapter. Apparently it was a read as a podcast as well.

This is set in solar system with a number of colonized planets.
However, the sun is dying, and as the reduction in sunlight makes the
climate on the outer planets intolerable, the people are trying to make
their ways to the inner ones.

Asala Sikou is an orphan, refugee, and soldier-for-hire. When a ship
called The Vela vanishes during what was supposed to be a
political-stunt rescue mission, a reluctant Asala is hired to team up
with Niko, the child of a wealthy inner planet's president, to find it
and the outer system refugees on board.

She has to find out how an entire ship disappeared, where it is, and
what was behind it all.


I had mixed reactions. The author list on this was fairly impressive,
so not too surprisingly the action was all right, and the plot had some
interesting twists here and there, although I thought it dragged at
times.

On the other hand, the science was so bad that I had a bunch of cringe
moments. They wanted to feature both climate change and refugee
problems as integral parts. However, they also decided to have the
climate problems be human made, so the purported reason that the sun is
dying is due to humans harvesting hydrogen from it for their fusion
reactors and to make water from oxygen mined from underground (what?!)

A star like the sun fuses  about 600 million tons of hydrogen every
second. The idea that these people, whose technology isn't that far
advanced from ours, removed any meaningful amount of hydrogen, let
alone enough to make the star's energy output drop significantly is
just, bleah.


Brian