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Sometimes, you start reading a book and realize that while it's good stuff, it's not /your/ kind of good stuff. That's rather how I felt about this book: the setting's wildly imaginative (and there's space pirates!) and perhaps a little reminiscent of the Final Fantasy games (although that might just be me) but it just failed to hook me up and reel me in. ( )

Imagine a balloon circling a distant star.

Imagine this balloon is thousands of miles in diameter.

Imagine that within this balloon there are societies clustered around fusion-powered miniature suns, all floating in the atmosphere within this balloon. Societies, polities, nations existing in low gravity who sail the skies on ships and bicycles of a mostly steampunk level of technology. A world of action, adventure, and swashbuckling goodness.

Welcome to Virga!

Sun of Suns introduces this audacious and awesome setting created by its author, Karl Schroeder (who I previously enjoyed his Lady of Mazes). Virga is sui generis as a setting, and Schroeder has carefully constructed his world to tell the kind of stories he wants. (There are good reasons why technology, aside from the fusion suns, technology is low, reasons that are revealed in the novel).

Clearly influenced by Dumas-like fiction, Sun of Suns is the first in a series of novels set in Virga. Sun of Suns tells the story of Hayden Griffin. His family was killed in an attempt to free his nation of Aerie from dominance by the nation of Slipstream, and he has sworn revenge and to continue his parents work to free Aerie. Events cause him, however, to join to an attempt by a small fleet from Slipstream to follow a map that may lead to a treasure beyond price that will give a decisive advantage over its own deadly rivals.Rivals that are no friends of Aerie, either...

Ships and bicycles that sail the skies. Nations and pirates. Sword duels and pistols. I am reminded of a lower tech milieu of the Disney movie Treasure Planet, except everything is contained within this balloon. We get hints of what the universe is like of this clearly artificial world, and are introduced to a character exiled from that outside world into Virga.

From Hayden Griffin's desire for revenge, to Admiral Fanning's quest for a decisive edge for Slipstream, to his wife,Venera Fanning, who has an obsession with a bullet wound from years ago, to the mysterious armorer from beyond Virga, Aubri McMallan, not only is the novel a rollicking adventure with flying ships, it also has larger-than-life characters appropriate to the setting.

My only complaint, perhaps is that Sun of Suns is a bit too short. Still, that only means that I will *definitely* be reading more of the three additional novels Schroeder has written in this amazing world.

If you are the type of fantasy and SF reader who enjoys Dumas-style action and adventure in addition to your SF fix, hoist sail and get thee a copy of Sun of Suns. You won't regret it. ( )

Imagine a world in which there is no gravity and yet there is still air. How would such a world come into existence? This book is set in the distant future in which a giant bag of air has been built in space, with an artificial sun in the middle. Nations are built on wheels that are spun to create gravity. As a boy, Hayden Griffin, witnesses his mother's death at the hands of an enemy nation. He vows to kill his mother's killer, but as he attempts to get close, he is swept along onto a military vessel that's mission is a secret ploy to defeat an even more powerful enemy nation that threatens them all.

The story is a lot of fun, with lots of rollicking low-gravity sword fights. The world building is very interesting and the characters are sympathetic and three-dimensional. Despite all this, something was lacking. I can't put my finger on exactly what it was, and it would be going too far to say that the story fell flat, but for some reason this didn't quite do it for me. A good story, but definitely put-downable. ( )

Great world-building in this, and like the rest of the Tor downloads, part of a larger series. Damn them. Instead of a world of land, with people on the skin, this world is air, with a skin keeping everyone in. There is a lot of really inventive use of gravity. And farming! Low-gravity farming, omigod. The gravity stuff is fascinating. The cities have their own "suns" to light and warm their homes. There are pirates and betrayal and little or no electricity, because most electrical stuff doesn't work? Fun, fun, fun. ( )

The premise: Hayden Griffin is out for revenge. His parents were part of a Resistance on Aerie and Aerie was building its own sun. The far more powerful Slipstream wouldn't hear of that, and destroyed the sun and everything with it. An orphaned Hayden decides to kill the man responsible for the murder of his parents. Only after enmeshing himself in the Slipstream and Admiral Fanning's household, Hayden becomes part of a bigger plot that doesn't just endanger Aerie, but the entire Slipstream as well. Sun of Suns is a story of high action and adventure, including pirates, treasure, artificial suns, and civilizations that live inside a giant air bubble (I'm SO not describing that well) called the Virga.

My Rating

Give It Away: for readers who want more character than action in their space opera, this book isn't going to fit the bill. However, I would recommend this book to readers who want something different out of their space opera, those who want settings that aren't of the usual plant-ship variety. Schroeder has a gift of creating impossible settings, so those SF readers who really sink their teeth into that sort of thing (and don't mind high action), definitely check this out. Fans of Tobias Buckell's action and thorough world-building should definitely check this out.

The full review (which doesn't include anything that could be a spoiler but does include the mass-market paperback cover) may be found in my LJ. As always, comments and discussion are most welcome.

REVIEW: Karl Schroeder's SUN OF SUNS

Happy Reading! :) ( )

This is a story of a galaxy in miniature created in a giant balloon. 5000 miles in radius, the balloon Virgas, holds hundreds of civilizations around a central internal "sun" called Candense. There are smaller ancillary suns floating in the outer reaches of the balloon also.

This is a story of a groups hunt for a treasure, for a way to save their local civilization, for anothers way to destroy the same, and finally a persons need to disable Candense and open Virga to attack.

There is lots going on here and the book it exciting and well paced. Pirate attacks, deceptions, double crosses, cold blooded murder, and romance are there for the reading.

My only problem was the ending. Seems as though the author reached hise word count and just cut off the story. A little more neatness was need.

All in all a very good book I would recommend to anyone. ( )

Virga is a Fullerene balloon. I’m not sure exactly what Fullerene refers to and a quick Google search didn’t clear it up for me. I’ll poke around that later. Virga is roughly 5,000 miles across and filled with air and all sorts of other stuff that could be used by the humans and other life that lives within.

There are lots of cool things that Schroeder works into the story. Naval fleets that travel like dirigibles in the nearly weightless Virga environment. Forests of plants that root to passing clumbs of earth and themselves trap more passing detritus that enables them to live. Except when too much oxygen builds up and it ignites in a tragic forest fire, which results in an oxygen deprived area if there aren’t enough gas current to carry away the carbon dioxide bubble. Then the areas are called sargassos. What else? Towns and cities having centrifugal wheels to create artificial gravity for the residents.

(Full review at my blog) ( )

http://hbpub.vo.llnwd.net/o16/video/o... Karl - Sun of Suns.html">http://e2ma.net/go/1049190889/947609/34748631/goto:http://hbpub.vo.llnwd.net/o16/video/o... Karl - Sun of Suns.html

Wooden ships, iron men, fusion suns and speeder bikes.

With a setup like that, the only thing missing is pirates. Fortunately, there are a whole passel of pirates to be found here, in various flavours.

A young man bearing a grudge sets out on a mission to murder the man who had his parents killed, for trying to provide the town they lived in their own independent power source.

Things are much more complicated than they seem as he runs into resistance fighter, his target's spymaster wife, an alien woman engineer, and a greater plot to take over they city state he is now part of.

All very cool. The setting is a giant balloon full of floating rocks, providing an atmosphere as they drift in space, with small cities built spinning if necessary to give gravity, and strange creatures in between in the dark and the cold.

The important fusion engine at the centre of this structure that provides heat and light, no-one seems to understand the technology anymore.

Apart from all that, with flying airship pirates you need treasure, and a mapl.

Yep, check. Swords and broadsides? Check, likewise.

The book also says 'Book One of Virga' - I have read the second, or at least presumably most of it, serialised in magazine form, and didn't really need to know what happened in this one, to read the next, either, if you are thinking of doing so, or might be put off by that.

A good effort, this novel.

http://freesf.blogspot.com/2008/04/su... ( )

Got about 50 pages in and gave up on this one. I just can’t read one more Luke Skywalker story, at least at this point in my life. I really can’t get myself to give a shit about some poor adolescent in a backwater town, even if it’s floating somehow in a huge bag of gas in space. Not interested, no thanks, I’ll pass. Mr. Schroeder’s flame has gone out already, alas. ( )

I like the setting of this immense artificial environment and Schroeder gets enough plot into this one short novel for a whole trilogy, particularly when he starts letting his readers on to the bigger game that he's playing.

What's a little problematic is that you have to get almost a third of the way into the book before you're really acclimatized to the reality you're reading about, as it's all so disorienting. I can see how some readers might not have the patience to do so.

Also off-putting at the start is the character of Hayden Griffin, who I gather one is supposed to care about. The problem for me is that too many real-life quiet loners with lethal missions have made it difficult for me to care about one in a novel. Hayden does rise above his seeming level, but it takes awhile. It's thus fortunate that one has the character of Verena Fanning, embittered survivor and high-ranking noblewoman to fill in the gap. She does capture one's imagination from the very start and holds the reader's attention while the threads of the story are woven together.

That I don't rate this novel a little higher is that I'm waiting to see if Schroeder can keep up the level of inventiveness he's shown, or whether he's already pretty much shot his bolt. ( )

http://jmgold.blogspot.com/2007/12/su... ( )

There's only a few hard science fiction writers I can stand to read. Schroeder is one. First, because he's writing about something really different; in the case of Suns, "different" means floating freefall cities built around nuclear-reactor suns, making for a truly bizarre but well-grounded set of societies. Second, and more importantly, because Schroeder performs that oft-forgotten but all-important step of putting actual people in his techno-dreams. And people, moreover, that I like. Gregory Benford, I hope you're taking notes.

Aside from the floating cities, the wild battles, and the woman wounded by a bullet fired in some unknown war millions of miles away (freefall! Nothin' to stop it movin'!), Schroeder also fascinates me with his... I suppose it's best described as a conflicted attitude towards AI. It's not the first time it's come up in his work -- you can see edges of it in Ventus and it's a strong undercurrent in Lady of Mazes. Schroeder seems to take the position that people in his future need to be protected from the all-powerful AIs, not because the AIs are hostile, but because the AIs can do and be everything... and thus there is no particular need for humans to do or be anything.

It's not a world-view I agree is an inevitable consequence of true AI, and certainly not one I would care to write about, but it's fascinating to watch Schroeder exploring all the consequences.

At any rate, aside from the techno-dream and the good characters, this is also a whizz-bang great bloody fun adventure story. If you've been looking for your sensawunda, I suggest you look for it here. ( )

http://tyranist.blogspot.com/2007/10/... ( )

Creative concept and fairly well-written, but the world building may be a little too complex- the overall character development left a lot to be desired. None of the characters ever "popped" off the page at me. ( )

http://www.fascinationplace.org/2007/... ( )

http://home.earthlink.net/~karen20000... ( )

Science fiction adventure in an exotic megastructure: a vast, air-filled bubble named Virga, lit by miniature suns. (The society in Virga has gotten to an early twentieth-century tech level, which is an interesting contrast to Niven's The Integral Trees and The Smoke Ring.) There's a posthuman world outside the bubble that apparently has some major flaws, but we've only caught glimpses of it as yet. ( )