-

I am not normally enticed by books which are part of a series. Authors that can keep interest and invention alive within the confines set by a series are rare. Buying into a series might mean missing much better stand alone novels from other authors. And this is 'book 2' of the Virga series, which I thought was a trilogy but now discover is longer. But I am happy to be following this series. Why? It effortlessly melds space opera and steam punk with some other other fiction genres, like the adventure novel. Virga is a enormous balloon in space containing air and a declined human civilisation living on spinning structures and dependent on small artificial suns to grow food. Outside Virga is a shadowy machine civilisation, whose agent was killed in the previous book, Sun of Suns, by the heroine of this book, Venera Fanning. Heroine is perhaps not quite the right term as Venera is a vicious Machiavellian whose bad temperament stems from a stray bullet that broke her jaw when she was young. Venera has a device which controls Candesce, the sun which serves Spyre, a cylinder world Venera lands on at the start of this book. The device is taken from her and this book is about how she tries to recover it from the bizarre clans (some squeezed into single buildings) that run Spyre. By the end of the book Venera is a changed woman, not least because she discovers the source of the bullet that has blighted her life. ( )

Even though i don't always love the writing, which gets a little... basic (i guess?) at times, karl schroeder knows how to create an interesting setting in which his trilogy "Virga" takes place: a massive bubble in space with wheels serving as hundreds of tiny planets a mile or so in diameter, rotating to create gravity.and the story is pretty good too. ( )

The second book of a series, although I hadn't read the first when I read this, so the character of Venera Fanning and the precarious situation she found herself in to begin with was new to me.

As a spymaster and agent type of the hardarsed and coldblooded variety (except occasionally as concerns her bloke) you see that she is sort of used to this sort of thing, and sets out trying to manipulate the new setting she has pretty much literally fallen into.

Schroeder's bizarre setting makes sun of it fun with the mini town/world type settings and microbattles with a few people per side, plus the odd wooden airship.

I liked the first book more, but here, the character of Venera is rather more sympathetic when she is the main character, as opposed to just one of as in the earlier find out what is actually going on with the technology supporting their environment novel.

http://notfreesf.blogspot.com/2008/06... ( )

Queen of Candesce stars the kind of female protagonist that I really like. If you don’t remember Virga from the previous book, it’s a gaseous habitat surrounding an artificial sun floating somewhere in space. The inhabitants live in micro-gravity, but most of them on spinning wheels to give them illusive weight. The sun, Candesce is more than artificial, it’s machine driven. During it’s quiescent periods, humans can cross the 100 miles of space and enter the control rooms even. At the end of Sun of Suns, Venera Fanning did just that. Afterwards, she hung on for dear life as an airbike raced out of Candesce, before it turned back on. Losing one’s grip isn’t so awesome.

This is where Queen of Candesce starts.

(Full review at my blog) ( )