SPSFC4 Review: Ancient as the Stars by Maya Darjani
Blurb:
For fans of Lower Decks, the Expanse, and Firefly: a found family time travel adventure with humor, snark, and lots of heart.
One kickass immortal sailship captain.
Captain Karenna Yilmaz of the Earth Union Fleet has it all. Adoring husband? Check. The enduring loyalty of her crew? Check. Transformation into a beautiful ageless immortal? Check. Check. Check. But when a dimensional rift brings her low-down, dust-sniffing, no-good younger self hurtling into the present, Karenna's carefully-constructed life wavers.
One snarky dust-addicted loser.
Flight Officer Ren Yilmaz is pretty sick of the hand she's been dealt. Her supervisor is an idiot. Her ex-husband is vindictive and has ruined her career. And now, here's her perfect future self, who everyone fawns over, while Ren is still ignored and alone.
They're the same person, 60 years apart
Both their ships are stranded: one in space, one in time. Karenna needs to get her crew home safe and sound. And Ren hasto get back to her reality and out of Karenna's shadow. Working together would mean literally facing their past–including old traumas and transgressions best kept hidden. But if they don't, they'll be stuck with each other until the end of time.
Review:
If you’re like me, when you hear ‘time travel’ you probably think about someone going back in time and ‘don’t step on the butterfly’ or I don’t know, your aunt is now purple and your mother has three heads. (Which in my case would be awful because my mother is from New York and does not need two extra mouths.)
This brings us to one of the things I really enjoyed about Ancient as the Stars. “They’re the same person, 60 years apart”, and except for a bit earlier on when this was identified as one of the problems, there was no ‘Don’t mess up the timeline’. The timeline had already been eaten by the cat, vomited on the carpet and cleaned up by the dog. Everyone was just allowed to get on with things. Not having that worry meant a lot of things could just be dealt with and didn’t need to be sidestepped because ‘the timeline!!!!’. And Ren just used the technology to catch up with things and be the best at her job despite everything in her life kind of being on fire. She was really having a bad time of things.
Ren is arguably one of the most realistic feeling characters I’ve come across in a while. She’s definitely not what you’d describe as having a good personality. She is exceptionally competent at her job, despite what her ex-husband and supervisor claim. She grows in the sense that she stops doing drugs on the actual military ship that definitely frowns on that sort of thing, but everything else that she achieves is because she is smart, crafty and maliciously compliant, which is the best kind of compliant. Her growth in the story is literally to get herself away from the rock and the hard place she’s been jammed into by those around her, including her future self that she calls her ‘sister.’ And she doesn’t do it all in a brilliant blaze of glory but in a very administratively satisfying way.
Onto her ‘sister’, Karenna. Karenna seems really perfect but she is worryingly indecisive in some respects because of trauma (who isn’t, am I right?). She works so hard to look like this impartial and all held together leader that as a result she is almost wilfully ignorant of things until she has to address them. This again felt really realistic because I’m sure we all know someone with slightly more authority on things that ‘can’t be seen playing favourites’. I liked her whole bit about being an ‘ageless immortal’, known as an Ancient. It’s fairly crucial to how it get to where she’s faced with her past but really just a cellular level thing that is eventually discovered by someone medically and boom, now you’re an Ancient and here’s your ring. (Genuinely Karenna gets a ring for it.) But still, there is some mystery because what causes it and why isn’t it more common if it’s as straightforward as it’s later depicted to be?
The end of the blurb ‘But if they don't, they'll be stuck with each other until the end of time.’ is a little misleading because really, the issue of Ren being 60 years in the future is still a problem but we’re all just fine with it now. Admittedly, we’re all just fine with it probably because it’s not the only issue faced in this book.
There is a side plot where everyone is navigating the intergalactic politics of a terrorist passing out some untraceable bombs, which relates to several planets and their governments having to cooperate. If this sounds vague to you, it’s a little bit because I struggled to follow it all. Like I get that three military ships where they shouldn’t be is a problem (oh, btw there is a third ship besides Ren and Karenna’s respective ships. It’s headed by Maxime Dupont who is kinda fun but if you were stuck working with him you’d be super annoyed), but I don’t feel like I fully understand the wider politics to really nail down the impacts of this. Other than the other planet leaders being big mad. I’m not really clear on how the head of this group was working with this mysterious other person to supply a wider group with explosives. It’s a relatively large part of the book and a fairly grey area of ambiguity in my understanding of it..
Some of this was likely down to the named cast being huge when not everyone is important or relevant and not everyone in a scene needed to speak in it. Between a lot going on and a lot of named people involved in it going on, I was left feeling like I generally got the key bits: whole ship jumped through time, terrorists with undetectable bombs, Ren’s ship is made up of asshats. But the finer details and wider context were generally lost to me.
Between the realistic feeling characters, the pop culture references and Maya’s absolute gold standard names for chapters, I look forward to seeing what else comes from her next. And if I can follow the politics of it all more easily then so much the better!
