Once a Hero
(The Serrano Legacy #4)

Elizabeth Moon

Riverdale: Baen, 1997. ISBN: 0-671-87871-9. Pp. 400

Review © 2006 Branislav L. Slantchev

This book came highly recommended and I was promised that I could still enjoy it even though it will essentially plunge me in the middle of the Serrano Legacy series. I do not think I missed a lot by skipping the previous entries: the novel is quite self-contained in terms of world-building and the protagonist, Esmay Suiza, was apparently a very minor character in the previous novel. Hence, no need for the background to understand what's going on. Having said that, I found the novel very slow going, especially in its first half, with the narrative finally gathering speed in the middle, and delivering a satisfying finale. I am not sure if I will be reaching for the sequels any time soon but I will keep Moon's series in mind.

Esmay is a low-ranking officer who has just been involved in a mutiny when her Captain, along with a bunch of other traitors, defected to the opposing side during a battle. Esmay turned out to be the ranking surviving officer after the mutineers manage to reclaim the ship, and she took her straight back into battle, arriving in the nick of time to save Serrano's behind. (These events are in the preceding novel.) The narrative opens with Esmay getting ready to face court-martial for her participation in the mutiny and a board inquiry for her handling of the ship afterwards. So far, so good.

Let's start with the bad because it really makes half the book very annoying. Moon's writing made me feel as if I was in a semi-translucent bubble, with Esmay walking around, almost totally self-absorbed in too much in touch with her own feelings to bother cluing in the reader about what's going on around her. I usually do not much care for the authors foreshadowing what's to come, but it's nice to know where the narrative is going, at lest once in a while. But Esmay just does things, and it's never quite clear why or how they fit in the overall scheme of things. Moon spends too much time describing Esmay's doubts in herself (which become very grating very quickly... Weber's Honor Harrington has similar predilections but at least she's so supremely competent, one tends to forgive these minor foibles). With all that indulgence (which no doubt passes for rich character development), most of the interesting events simply occur and are dismissed with a paragraph or so (case in point, the court-martial).

We're off to a rocky start and things get much worse when Esmay returns to her home planet where she gets to pout, ride horses in green valleys, lie on her back staring at the sun, and discover a secret that has been tormenting her for many years. There's too much of a 'fantasy' feel for this to sound right, and I did not care about the lavish attention Moon pays to horses. But all of this pales when compared to the main purpose of this part of the story: Esmay finds out that she had been raped as a child during the planet's civil war. Worse, her family had lied to her, telling her that the pain was just brought on by a fever. As a result, Esmay has spent many years with recurring nightmares related to the rape.

Why do authors who write about strong female leads feel bound to have them raped (or at least assaulted with an intent to rape)? Is it to make them vulnerable (cf. Honor) or explain their apparent weakness (as it appears to be the case here)? I just don't get it. Maybe it's a reflection of the idea that abuse of women is widespread? I have no clue. But that's not even the main point: I just did not understand or believe that Esmay would spend so many years without being able to put some distance between her and the rape. It's not exactly clear to me how many years have elapsed, but a decade does not seem unreasonable. And Moon is going to tell me that (a) Esmay is just as hurt as before, and it's apparently getting worse, not better, and (b) when she finds out the truth, her anger is as strong as if the incident had happened yesterday. Now, I see how one can claim (a) by saying that since the truth had been denied her, Esmay never really had a chance to deal with her pain properly. But that turns (b) into nonsense: it's not hard to understand why her family tried to protect her by lying—she was a kid, after all, they did not think she remembered what had happened to her (and they did kill the rapist). Given all that, she should have taken the chance to heal rather than turn around and leave the planet in a huff.

Anyway, Esmay's pain is then used as an explanation of why she was underperforming so badly that nobody in the Navy expected her to display the abilities she apparently had all along. Never mind that these sorts of abilities need to be honed through experience which she could not have had because of her underperformance. Moon seems to think that leaders and supremely competent commanders are born but this is not so. Unlike Honor (who excelled in the Academy), Esmay has never shown any potential, and so to think that suddenly she will become this all-star tactician is just... well, beyond science fiction.

The narrative picks up when Esmay returns to active duty and is assigned to a DSR (deep-space repair facility, an enormous ship that sort of floats in space an sometimes goes to wrecked military vessels to fix them). There's an elaborate plot by the Bloodhorde (again, too much fantasy-style Conan-the-Barbarian in a space-ship nonsense) to steal the DSR with the help of some consultants who are in it for the money, as usual. (Why Moon spends so much time on these peripheral characters, I do not get; she gets the consultants murdered very quickly.) I liked the way the officers recognized Esmay's talents (if we grant that she has them), and the Bloodhorde's takeover of the DSR with Esmay's subsequent adventures are the only things that redeem the novel from a total loss.

In the end, there's nothing much to recommend here. As a writer, Moon still is nowhere near Weber (on his better days) or Feintuch, not to mention Heinlein. Maybe it's the female perspective, but this near total self-absorption of the protagonist to the almost complete exclusion of action was just too much. Perhaps it would have been acceptable if there was more going on inside but it's essentially the same reel stuck in an endless loop: Esmay is tormented by her nightmares arising from the rape that her family had lied to her about. And the "fix" is so stereotypical, I was going to cry: we know everything will be fine in the end because Esmay beds a young dashing Serrano. Please. The combat sequences were fine even though too much time is spent in moving and not enough time in acting.

As a whole, the novel was average. It's not bad enough to dismiss the entire series out of hand but it's not good enough to make me want to go out and buy the sequels.

June 8, 2006