Judith Tarr: Forgotten Suns

I must admit at the outset that I may not be capable of writing objectively about Judith Tarr's science fiction space opera Forgotten Suns. You see, Tarr is one of a large handful of authors I whose work I adore without reservation, and this book is the unexpected and completely amazing sequel to my very favourite of her many works, the double trilogy Avaryan Rising and Avaryan Ascendant.

If you are familiar Tarr's books, you may be going "whoa, what was that?" just now, because the Avaryan series is written as pure, epic high fantasy, and I've just described Forgotten Suns as a science fiction space opera. If you want to know how that can be, it's best if you read Tarr's own explanation, from her The Big Idea post on John Scalzi's Whatever blog [1]. I'll just add that, after you take a minute to rethink the story of Mirain and his descendants in the Avaryan series in the language of science fictional conventions and assumptions (and Tarr makes it easy to do this by laying out for the reader all the keys needed - the Rosetta stone, as it were, for translating fantasy to science fiction - in the text), it all makes perfect sense.

The story itself begins with an archeological dig on the virtually abandoned world that its newest inhabitants call Nevermore. There are ruins suggesting a large and highly developed civilisation, and a small population of illiterate nomads. It appears as though the original inhabitants simply left - but before so doing, they carefully obliterated all images of their people from the cities they left behind.

When Aisha, the daughter of the lead archeologists, seeks to help her parents find something spectacular that will revitalise their waning research funding, she unknowingly awakens a millenias-old sleeper left behind - who realises that he has been woken for a reason, to find out what happened to the people who have gone before, and save them in their hour of need.

The quest involves the sleeper - now called Rama - along with Aisha, her aunt, a traumatised Military Intelligence officer, the Galactic Psycorps, space whales who sing, an opera star, and a journey across space, time, and the multiverses.

It's magical and sciencefictional, it's a wild ride and a slow-unfolding love story, it's got everything you want in a space opera from pirates to mysteries, plots and betrayals, a rag-tag army and a nasty and corrupt galactic government.

It's just perfect.

[1] http://whatever.scalzi.com/2015/05/07/the-big-idea-judith-tarr/