Recent Entries

Unfortunately, this is where the novel gets mired in slightly nonsensical politics. Though Cambias has created marvelously believable aliens in the Ilmatarans, his Sholen are a half-baked mess of contradictions and inexplicable motivations. They're a kind of insectile culture with a bonobo-like approach to socializing — they value cooperation more than anything, and treat sex the way humans treat an intimate conversation over lunch. But the Sholen are also incredibly authoritarian, and dispatch a starship full of heavies as soon as they find out what's happened to the human expedition.

What follows is a protracted political scuffle, where the Sholen order the humans to leave Ilmatar and the humans protest. Things escalate quickly, forcing Rob and his colleagues to ask Broadtail's scientific group to help them. The problem is that we never fully understand the Sholens' motivations. Why would they come to the moon, at great expense, simply to prevent humans from contacting the Ilmatarans? What do they have to gain? We hear that the Sholen are rigidly eco-fascist, hellbent on keeping their civilization limited to their carefully de-polluted planet. So their resistance to human exploration is purely ideological — they literally have nothing to gain other than adhering to their own belief system of non-interference and non-colonization. Which isn't a terribly realistic motivation.

This is just one of many ways A Darkling Sea takes its cues from 1960s Star Trek and classic novels like Larry Niven's Ringworld. It's an old-school adventure tale about the importance of scientific discovery, featuring cool but nevertheless one-note aliens who can be summed up as "warlike" or "greedy" or "tribal." The Sholen behave the way they do because they're "anti-colonialist," and have no more complex motivations than that.

“ As a space opera with intriguing aliens, 'A Darkling Sea' is a success; as a political thriller, not so much.