Sporting Chance
(The Serrano Legacy #2)

Elizabeth Moon

Riverdale: Baen, 1994. ISBN: 0-671-87619-8. Pp. 383

Review © 2007 Branislav L. Slantchev

At the end of the the first installment in this series, Heris Serrano was offered a chance to rejoin Fleet when her resignation was set aside on the grounds that Admiral Lepescu had indulged in hunting for sport members of her crew that were supposed to have avoided court-martial by her sacrifice. Although it's a bit murky just how her refusal to obey a direct command in battle could be "re-examined" (maybe it was all due to Lady Cecelia's political interference), Heris now voluntarily turns down the offer to remain the captain of the yacht Sweet Delight (gotta love that un-military name). The idea, of course, is that she would want to return to service without a shadow of a doubt in her abilities.

On the way back from Sirialis, the Crown Prince whom they had found manhunting and whom they whisked away in secret to avoid political embarrassments reveals himself to be quite stupid. In more stupid than is allowed even for a spoiled aristocrat. Definitely more stupid than a Registered Embryo (bred for intelligence) should ever have been. Both Heris and Cecelia suspect foul play: somebody must have tampered with the Prince to make him regress so. When Cecelia takes her concerns to the King, it turns out that the King is on it for some hard to explain reasons having to do with his desire to simultaneously assure his succession (so an heir apparent is needed) and prevent any attempts to usurp his throne before he decides to retire (so such an heir should not be too cocky... unlike his elder son who tried to foment a rebellion and got himself assassinated on the orders of the King). But I digress. The point is that the Prince is stupid, the King knows it, although he now has some regrets.

Of course, this knowledge is explosive, and the person who did the actual poisoning (and who just happens to be a long-time enemy of Lady Cecelia) is naturally worried about being exposed. So that person just as naturally poisons Cecelia when the latter ignores Heris's warnings to be more careful. Cecelia ends up in near vegetative state (not quite in a coma) and her family immediately initiates legal proceedings to secure her wealth. When it comes out that Cecelia has very recently changed her will to leave the yacht to Heris, all hell breaks loose and Heris finds herself the target of a lawsuit to undo the bequest on the grounds that she had exerted undue influence on Lady Cecelia.

Of course, Cecelia's other friends, Ronnie and Brun, both recently matured through their ordeal on Sirialis, are convinced that Cecelia is not entirely incapacitated (true) and is being kept in that vegetative state artificially (true) on the orders of her assailant (true). Now why that assailant would risk Cecelia regaining the use of her body, especially when that person knows Cecelia is actually conscious, is not explained to my satisfaction. Moon spins a story about that person's sick desire to whisper "I did it" in Cecelia's ear during every visit to the hospital, but I find this a bit thin. Especially when we are told what a master manipulator that person happens to be. This is important because, like in every bad movie with an arch villain, the hero will escape and come back to defeat the villain when that villain sets up an elaborate scheme to incapacitate the hero instead of just having her offed in the traditionally unimaginative (but very effective) sort of permanent way.

After Brun evolves a hare-brained scheme to abduct Cecelia's inert body in a hot air balloon (a scheme guaranteed to work precisely no sane person would ever think of it), the miraculous recovery can start in earnest. While this is going on, Heris is on the run in the yacht she stole when the King asked her to go on a secret mission for him: to make the Prince smart again. There are some legal complications there as well, the chief being that there are numerous clones of the Prince and nobody seems to know who the real one is. At the very last minute before this escapade, Heris takes on a new crew member, somebody from her former command. When things start going haywire on the ship, nobody seems to correlate their sudden appearances with that particular individual's arrival. Instead, they latch onto Sirkin, the one competent civilian crew-member, and her supposed grief for her lost lesbian lover (killed by agents of the Benignity) making her too distracted to work. I, for one, could not believe Heris would fail to put two and two together.

There is one vaguely entertaining space battle (I just can't accept anything less than what Weber would have written) but most of the novel is just an ordinary adventure that just happens to be set in a sci-fi universe. In other words, the science fiction element is not all that integral to the plot, and something quite like the entire story could have been profitably set in, say, 18th century England. The same, of course, could have been easily said about the previous novel which has even less of a futuristic element in it. I was quite partial to the albino cockroaches (gotta admit that using them to strip the old furnishings on a ship, then convert them into biomass, dye them, and use that to create the new ones, is an ingenuous, if slightly repulsive, idea). Other than that, we have too little action. I would have hoped for more on Lady Cecelia's "trapped inside an unresponsive body" predilection but instead we get the usual full recovery with rejuv to boot.

On the political side, the Benignity seems to have infiltrated almost everything in the Familias Regnant for purposes yet unknown (and to be disavowed in the later books). The most important event on the political side must be the King's abdication and the abolition of the monarchy. It's not easy to see why we should care about that given how insignificant these details have been to the main plots of both books. It's not at all easy to sustain dramatic tension at the level of high politics when you never bothered to get the heroes involved there.

Again, as is by now usual for me with Moon's books, the experience is uneven: I had my hopes raised by the first novel only to feel the slight tinge of disappointment with this one. At least the narrative is readable, and I am hoping that the next book will not happen to be the one that introduced the slightly oblique style that I found so irritating in her later novels.

March 23, 2007