Velocity Weapon

Rating 4 of 5

Velocity Weapon is a fun piece of popular science fiction.

There’s three main threads in the book and a smaller side thread

• Sanda: a space navy gunnery sargent story of wakes up on “The Light of Berossus” (Bero) which is a AI powered Ship/Weapon. Bero is constructed by the rebel planet Icarion. Bero is massive both a ship and a weapon. Bero “recruits Sanda in helping helping him travel to the next start system (Artux) which is expected to be 76 years trave at Bero’s max speed of 8% the speed of light.
• Biran: Sanda’s younger brother. I high ranking Prime “Keeper” who spends most of novel trapped in political fights he doesn’t understand trying to find Sanda
• Jules: A low-life criminal living in the ghetto of the Prime settlement in the Artux system. Jules and her crew are tricked? into stealing something that results in Jules becoming a pawn in a game she doesn’t understand
• The fourth smaller side thread is the story of Alexandra Halston. This side story happens in the distant past. Alexandra is a Elon Musk type whose corporation (Prime) builds a space elevator and discovers the Alien tech in the asteroid belt that allows the Prime corporation to build the “gates” that allow humanity to travel faster then light through the galaxy.

The World of Velocity weapon is a sort of Oligarchy where the “Prime” corporation more or less controls society because it owns all the “gate” technology, construction and operations. This means that society is basically dominated by the “Primes” and their vague corporate Governance structure.

As novel is pretty well constructed with a lot of layers that play out as you read it. Third person characters motives are largely ambiguous and its difficult to tell the heros from the villains for most of the novel. You sometimes question the motivations of the POV characters even. Is “Sanda” really a good person working for a bad corporation? Is the Prime good or bad? Who really is Bero this “AI” ship? Its pretty unclear in the novel which keeps things interesting.

The story balances the threads pretty well and I didn’t find switching between the different first person points of view too difficult. The Jules story is the least interesting, but you stay with it because you can tell its going to be important to the plot later so its not bad, just the least good.

Some of what I don’t like about the story is I find the division of labor between humans and AI somewhat unbelievable. Also it seems somewhat contrived that Icarion can somehow stand up to a Galatic Corporate empire like prime. In the end some of this really comes together more like a high quality Star Trek episode rather then some deep science fiction, but I think that’s ok. Books with too much realism can be a little boring. So I don’t actually hold the fact the the faster then light travel and AI treatment by the novel seems a little weak.

One super nit-picky complaint I have about the novel is the character names. I OFTEN read Sanda as “Sandra” and “Biran” as Brain. Why not go with simpler names? I realize these are just labels but often this is awkward. The book indicates a lot of the space colonists are Ecuadorian descent.
Wouldn’t Sandra and David or Darwin make more sense?

What I don’t like about the novel is Sanda develops a romantic relationship with the “spy” sent to find her (Tomas) pretty quickly. Its all a little too pushed into the book. Like the author felt like She needed a romance angle to keep people engaged. To me it just didn’t need to be there and I feel like keeping the Tomas character more ambiguous and less romantically attached to Sanda would have made for a better story.

All in all Velocity Weapon is a fun novel. I’m going to read the next book in the series and I hope the universe continues to unfold in interesting and unexpected ways.