Nick Seafort, narrator, starts out feeling miserable and goes downhill from there. David Feintuch wanted to write a story about a man who found himself trapped in a position of command that he neither wanted nor felt qualified to hold - but, by strict interpretation of the relevant laws, was obligated to accept. To paraphrase something he explains in a brief essay at the start of a hardback collecting this novel and the next in the Seafort Saga, he figured that to make such a story work he had to put the hero in a position where it was not possible to pick up the phone, call Headquarters, and say, "Excuse me, I'm way too inexperienced to command this ship, so could you put a more experienced military officer on a jet and get him out here to take over within the next day or two?" Which is what would happen today if a junior officer suddenly found himself in command of a large military unit.
One possibility was to set the whole thing a couple of hundred years ago, before telecommunications existed. If you were a thousand miles from home, you were basically incommunicado. A year from now, when you got back to where you had started from, your superiors would glance at your report and say "well done" (or "badly done") and that was that. In the meantime, you were on your own, sink or swim. Feintuch was thinking of the old British Royal Navy, circa the 18th Century. The problem was that he didn't know much about the details of proper sailing technique in the 18th Century and didn't really want to invest all the time it would take to learn enough to convince history buffs that he had his head screwed on straight.
So it was time to get creative. Why not design a new culture that had exactly the elements he needed for his story idea to work, without anyone else being able to claim that they knew more about all the other pesky little details of this culture than he did? Writers of SF and Fantasy often indulge themselves in that regard, since they're allowed to create new worlds as they go along. Hence, he set the whole novel in the late 22nd Century, detailing the three-year round trip made by the U.N.S .Hibernia, a starship headed from Earth to Hope Nation, a colony planet, with stops at a couple of space stations in other solar systems for good measure. But the military hierarchy was unashamedly modeled on the way the British used to do things in their own long cruises in the days of wooden sailing ships. The Hibernia has the following collection of officers aboard as their journey commences:
1 Captain
3 Lieutenants
4 Midshipmen
1 Chief Engineer
1 Pilot
1 Doctor
For a grand total of 11 officers. However, under the rules, only line officers can command spacecraft of the United Nations Naval Service. Captains, Lieutenants, and Midshipmen are line officers. "Staff officers" are medical officers, engineering officers, and pilots, and are not eligible. If something happens to the officer who was Captain during a long cruise, whichever surviving line officer has the highest rank, and the highest seniority within that rank, takes over.
Feintuch wanted to stress the idea that Midshipman Nick Seafort (senior Midshipman of the four on board) was grossly unprepared for the burden of command, so he had all of his midshipmen be teenage boys. Nick is 17 when we first meet him. To justify this, Feintuch invented a somewhat unconvincing excuse regarding the perilous scourge of "Melanoma T," a dreaded carcinoma provoked by prolonged exposure to the "N-waves" which drive the ship at speeds far faster than light. It appears that if you are first exposed to N-Waves when you are still a growing adolescent, you will probably acquire an immunity to their effects without dying of it. If you only make your first voyage as a grown adult, but never make another one (i.e. if you emigrate from Earth to a colony planet and then stay there for the rest of your life), it is highly unlikely that anything terrible will happen. But if you start making interstellar voyages after you're in your 20s (or older) and then continue to make them frequently over the next several years, as a ship's officer for instance, there's an unpleasantly high chance that the cumulative effect of all those N-waves will cause you to die. Accordingly, if you want to be an officer, you apply for the Academy when you're, say, 12 or 13. They run you through a very intense two years of nonstop training in everything a junior officer on a spaceship ought to know, then give you the uniform of a midshipman and send you out on a voyage. Likewise, enlisted men who want to make a career of the Navy are vigorously recruited while still in their teens.
As I said, Melanoma T is unconvincing - but I meant that this is a problem if you expected this novel to be medically accurate. If you are prepared to take it as space opera, then you can accept it as a convenient plot device and move right along to the next plot development without batting an eye. The best way to define space opera is to give the classic example: Star Wars. In the Star Wars universe, the advanced technology only exists in order to transport the characters where George Lucas wants them to go, and do the things the story requires them to do. We are never told how you build a lightsaber, so we can't easily poke holes in the idea that such things are possible. It's the same with the Seafort Saga: after all, Feintuch was trained as a lawyer, not a physicist or engineer!
So the four senior officers die (not all at the same time) and Seafort is left holding the bag. Much of the novel focuses on his own psychological torment and the various crises which trigger fresh outbreaks of it. He knows perfectly well that he is a poor pilot, weak on the mathematics of the engineering that makes the ship go, lacking in the assured self-confidence which a true leader should radiate, and often caught unawares by people's reactions to one thing or another when he probably should have foreseen the problems that would develop. For what it's worth, he has the military regulations just about memorized, but is keenly aware that this doesn't mean he will always know the best procedure in an emergency. He tries to console himself with the thought that when they finish the cruise to Hope Nation the Admiral who is in command of local Navy forces in that solar system will replace Seafort with someone much better qualified for commanding the return voyage . . . but I'll tell you right now that it doesn't work out quite that easily for him. All this inner torment is convincingly done (I thought) and very refreshing compared to the typical "space opera" hero who always seems equal to the challenge after thinking for a moment or two to find the best possible way to attack the problem. Each plot twist (and there are many surprises as we go along) seems skillfully calculated to give Seafort even more things to worry about. Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, it does! Some of the junior officers he gets saddled with at one point are just . . . well, I'll let you find out for yourself!
My only objection is that the Seafort Saga is currently 7 volumes long (the latest just came out in hardback this week, and I haven't read it yet) and all that suffering gets overdone after a while. However, reading one volume to see if you like Feintuch's style won't kill you. Honest!
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