Sun of Suns
Book One of Virga
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Sun of Suns
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Narrated by:
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Joyce Irvine
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By:
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Karl Schroeder
About this listen
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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Critic reviews
“The swashbuckling space settlers of Schroeder's fantastical novel inhabit warring nation-states inside a planet-sized balloon called Virga. This adventure-filled tale of sword fights and naval battles stars young Hayden Griffin of the nation of Aerie, orphaned by an attack on the artificial sun that his parents tried to build. Schroeder layers in scientific rationales for his air-filled, gravity-poor world-with its spinning cylinder towns and miles-long icebergs-but the real fun of this coming-of-age tale includes a pirate treasure hunt and grand scale naval invasions set in the cold, far reaches of space.” —Publishers Weekly
“Outrageously brilliant and absolutely not to be missed.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“We already knew that Karl Schroeder could do Kubrick. Now it turns out he can do Dumas as well. And more: not since Middle Earth have I encountered such an intense and palpable evocation of an alien world. Sun of Suns puts the world-building exercises of classic Niven to shame.” —Peter Watts
a fascinating physics read
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Great setting characters and dialog need work.
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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.
Would not recommend
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