Trading in Danger by Elizabeth Moon
I don’t usually like hard sf. It’s very difficult to find a line between “too alien to make sense” and “not alien enough to be plausible” and so often, hard SF authors devote much more time to their engineering flights-of-fancy than to the characters that populate their worlds.
So I was surprised by how much I enjoyed TRADING IN DANGER. It starts out on the day the protagonist, Kylara Vatta, gets kicked out of her military academy. While I never did understand why her supposed crime was anything like a scandal, I appreciated that she didn’t have a Dumbledore “Now, Harry, I know you broke every rule the school had and someone died, but instead of kicking you out, I’m giving you a medal” moment. Great! This world has real consequences.
Ky gets shunted off by her family on a “milk run” an easy journey to take a ship to its final destination, where it will be sold for scrap. She decides to make a side trip for some personal profit, with the idea that she might use the money to refurb the ship and keep it instead of selling it as her family intends. Just an easy side trip.
But of course things don’t go as planned. Ky runs into one problem after another, frequently because of unplanned expenses and stodgy and uncooperative bureaucrats. I loved this, that in the future, things are so civilized that even hired thugs behave according to rules and regulations, where trash talk includes citing obscure legal codes. The plotting was great, with twists and turns and more twists and turns and plan B turning into Plan C and then plan D.
I liked Kylara as a main character. She’s inexperienced enough to have to figure things out as she goes along, with a need to prove herself, but she’s also a well-trained type A person with a lot of resources to draw from. Rich, but not spoiled.
While Kylara does belabor some aspects of her personality, namely, whether or not she’s too soft and gullible, and whether or not it’s horrible to enjoy violence, I felt the level of character development was just about right. It didn’t interfere with the plot. Some of the descriptive details of the world went on too long, but more often than not, I found myself wondering why I wasn’t bored by it.
I recommend this for people who want a good space adventure story with a likable protagonist.
