The Shieldrunner Pirates series would be one of the first indicators I had that the playing field of available literature in the genre I wanted was growing, and was already larger than just the one pivotal novel I had read. I went tearing through Barns and Noble looking for who knows what, and was grabbing things off the shelf that looked interesting (hadn’t been in ages anyway). I managed to grab Gravity of a Distant Sun, which is literally the third in the series, and it was like “how is it that every book I touch has space lesbians, this is amazing!” So I was patient, and ordered the other two online so I could read them sequentially.
And I did read all of them. And for a hot minute it was the closest thing I had to more comp cannon fodder. But, not really.
I had to have enjoyed these if I read all of them, and there were plenty of things I can recall liking about them. I liked the world building of how humanity really ingrained themselves in the nearby parts of the solar system. I liked the space piracy (literally was my wedding theme the year before, so major points there). But inevitably I couldn’t call it a real comparison beyond “there is a space station, and on it, there are occasionally lesbians.” Which, even NASA can claim that comparison.
Barbary Station certainly has the creepy space station vibes I was going for, but the whole series veers really heavily into computer science and artificial intelligence. And me, I’m just this gearhead engineer. In fact, I was so excited to start my first engineering job in the Bay Area until everyone I met would tell me “yeah so what? I’m also an engineer.” And it would mean they did coding. This series started off great with the pirates and the lovers on the run, and then it went so hard into hacker territory I felt like I didn’t own enough oversized black hoodies to sit comfortably in its presence.
There’s nothing wrong with this. And one of my favorite parts of science fiction is the propagation of technology from where it stands today to what it might be like tomorrow. But it showed me that if I sit still and think about where our technology is headed then my story would also need to be about endless AI computer hacking. And this was before ChatGPT got big this past year. In honesty, I actually think this series does one of the best jobs of considering the eventual propagation of commercialized industry and personal computerized tech, but it also made me want to write a story where technology didn’t really have many more bells and whistles than it did in, well, Alien (the 1979 version, none of this Romulus remake whatevers).
Okay so crushing dependency on AI and computer hacking aside, there were other issues I ran into with using this series as any form of comp. The central relationship was refreshingly gay, and I enjoyed that it never really waivered throughout. But, it bored me. Not only that, but I found the characters were a bit infuriating. You have one who is just addicted to her hacker job, and the other who just keeps putting up with it. In one book they hardly even interact. It made it a little hard to care about the “love wins” tagline the last book (and the first I had picked up) sported inside the jacket. I know the author was trying to tie up some loose ends in the story, but by the time I was done I figured that little phrase just meant “love wins the Funyun dust on your workaholic spouse’s fingers,” (I love Funyuns, come at me bro).
I suppose a part of my reaction to this was to set some rules and boundaries on how I generated the relationships between my main characters. I needed that relationship to not get blindsided by the rest of the plot. I needed my two gay idiots to actually interact romantically, or at least romantically-related in some way shape or form. If I let myself sink too deeply into the high-tech side of things, well then, I might as well have just forced all these agents to read my ill-fated Masters thesis on electrical space propulsion and then called it a day.
I did still try to list Barbary as a comp, if anything for the “Haunted Space Station” vibes it wanted to give me. And the relationship between the two main characters was still sorta fun in that book. But its another case of me needing to separate the tone of one book in a series from the series overall. In general, the Shieldrunner Pirates series was a solid foray into some more robust modern science fiction, as opposed to some of the “we conquered the moon in the distant year of 2002” classics we all know and love. So I enjoyed them, just, not as anything I could really use to compare my own work to. And thus, the search continued.
AZ ROZKILLIS 