Reviewed by Chris
TITLE: Perihelion
SERIES: Queenships
AUTHOR: Tami Veldura
PUBLISHER: Oldewolff Alternascents
LENGTH: 164 pages
RELEASE DATE: April 15, 2016
BLURB:
Kato Ozark, crown prince and soldier, has just been chosen to pilot his family’s queenship. He’s trained his entire life for this honor, but it comes with a catch. It seems that First Engineer Mas’ud Tavana has also been chosen as the queen’s pilot. Mas’ud has no formal training, and they both believe a mistake has been made. But when an attack on a distant Ozark queen forces them to work together, it’s clear their minds are better as one than apart.
They might even go on a proper date. Through mission briefings and politically required offspring, the mental link their queenship forges between them only grows stronger. Within this bond they find strength in each other. Then a rogue AI attacks their ship, ripping the queen open to the core. The two pilots feel it all; the assault destroys their connection and tears them adrift into open space.
Kato and Mas’ud wake up in the medical bay of a rival family with no memory of their queenship or each other. Hailed as a war hero, Kato retrains as a kingship pilot, preparing to defend Earth against the AI. Mas’ud, dismissed as permanently broken, struggles to rediscover his own truth.
Their queenship is out there, waiting for her pilots to come home. The future of their family depends on it.
REVIEW:
Boy, how to sum up this book…
So this book is set many many years in the future. Humans have expanded their reach out into our solar system and beyond. They managed to do this with the help and use of Queenships. A Queenship is basically a living space ship. It is completely sentient, and is able to change its shape and purpose to fit its pilot’s needs. The pilots are chosen by the Queenship and are linked psychically with the ship till basically the pilot dies. The ship will then select a new pilot and the cycle begins again. All Queenships (and by extenstion the pilots) are owned and operated by a ruling family. Ozark is one of the largest families. Dhar is another.
This is where one of our MCs, Kato, comes in. He is the grandson of one of the main Ozark pilots, and so is up for selection on the new Ozark Queenship, Selvans. He never expected to be selected as pilot, though. Selvans has other ideas about that. Kato is her pilot and she will have him. But in a wholly unprecedented move, she will also have another: Mas’ud Tavana. Mas’ud is from none of the ruling families. He is a lead mechanic and able to manipulate ships like no-other, but in this world that is not much. Being chosen as pilot is unthinkable. But Selvans has spoken and she will have Mas’ud and Kato, and no others.
However, not long into their piloting of Selvans they run across an anomaly. A Queenship unlike any other. An AI that has been constructed, not born, and that can vastly outmaneuver and out-power all the ships she comes across, but who seems to lack the soul (and sanity) of normal Queenships. With a rouge ship terrorizing space, and two new and untried pilots in her path, destruction is all but assured.
Kato and Mas’ud must be kept safe, though, for Selvans will have it no other way.
This book was first written for Goodreads M/M Romance Group’s annual writing event. I never got to read it then, but when I was trolling thru amazon one day for upcoming releases I saw this book and was intrigued. When it was offered to Love Bytes for review, and I saw that one of the characters was in fact a trans man, I was all over it. It has been a while since I read anything properly scifi, and this was looking better and better.
What I found inside was beyond my expectations in many ways. The construction of this scifi universe and its Queenships were complex and unique from anything I had read previously. The characters were from a wide array of racial backgrounds. In fact Kato is African-American, and Mas’ud is Persian. The fact that this was a human-populated scifi that did not relegate the people of color to secondary-character status was refreshing to see. The way that they were just there and it was normal and not worth commenting on, was one of the things I loved about this story.
Mas’ud being a trans man was also a big selling point. For obvious reasons. But I liked how Mas’ud was not just a trans man. That wasn’t his role. He was a mechanic, a pilot, a man…the fact he was born biologically a woman just was something that happened, not who he was. This has been something I (and other transgender people) have been asking for for a while. A character that is trans…and so much more. I might now understand Mas’ud desire to have kids (I honestly don’t understand anyone’s desire to procreate) but it was also nice to see his reaction to the possibility.
I found the plot here both simple and terribly complex. On the surface, it is a story of two men trying to figure out how they fit together with both themselves and with their new role on Selvans (oh, and also saving the universe). But this story weaves about thirty different threads together to make this complex tapestry of Families fighting for power, people fighting for the right to move outside of the Families, and the danger of creating things you have no hope of controlling.
And for all the beauty I found in it by the end of the story, it was at times very confusing. We were thrown into scenes with random characters that are not really introduced at all (or seen again) and expected to know who they are, what their allegiances are, and how they are tied into the greater whole. I could see that the author creating something large and detailed, but I still was left floundering more times than I wanted to be. I think the author had a very clear idea about how all of these people connected and why their part of the story needed to be told, but they sometimes didn’t do a great job of showing the reader why that was. This, and the fact that I don’t really enjoy books where the story is told by so many different characters, is probably why this only came in at 4 stars for me. By the end I could appreciate what had been done, but that doesn’t diminish the fact that I spent a lot of time reading it stuck in half-confused mode.
I will say this, if you intend to read this book, there is an index of characters and other information at the end of the book. Read that first. You might not need all the information or even remember most of it, but it can be extremely helpful in helping you orientate yourself in this universe. I didn’t know about it till a friend pointed it out to me, and it would have been very handy to have some of that information before I began reading.
Overall this was beautifully written and crafted. I did enjoy reading it, and if the author wishes to grace us with another book set in this world I would gladly read it. I found the action scenes enthralling, and the characters were truly well written. Even with the problems I ran across in regards to storytelling did not make this less of an entertaining scifi story.
RATING: 
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