The Fall of the Censor

[ndrosen]

When not busy with patent applications or following the news and my favorite websites, I have been reading Karl Gallagher’s The Fall of the Censor, a science fiction series comprising three books so far (Storm Between the Stars, Between Home and Ruin, and To Seize What’s Held Dear), with a fourth book to follow in a few months, and I don’t know how many after that. The author has been clever at devising some imaginary physics to make space opera possible, involving a hyperspace with clouds and shoals of aether. A sphere of aether shoals has kept a region including three habitable planets isolated for nine hundred years, but now a tramp freighter has discovered an opening letting its crew explore the greater galaxy beyond, from which their ancestors fled from a devastating war centuries earlier.

It turns out that an empire called the Censorate has taken over, and that histories and written records have become strictly illegal (with some narrow exceptions); ordinary subjects are supposed to believe that the Censorate is a million or so years old. Our gallant captain and crew do some trading and learn a few things, while the local Governor (he rules over Corwynt, which the traders visit, and several other worlds, a tiny fraction of the whole empire) learns that there are inhabited planets outside the Censorate.

The stage is set for combat in space, and also for trade and cultural exchange between the Fierans (the tramp freighter is from Fiera) and the Corwynti subjects of Censorate. The Censorials are not beloved by most of the ordinary people of Corwynt, and likely not by the people of most of their other planets, but they rule by threatening massive bombardment of any planet where a rebellion succeeds.

There is some wit in the books, and some insight into how different cultures could work, and how their different laws, customs, and ways of seeing the world could lead to both mutual benefit and conflict.

Comments

[selenite0]

Thank you for the kind words!

I'm tentatively estimating the series at nine books, but don't have a detailed plot worked out. My writing style is more exploratory. Captain, Trader, Helmsman, Spy is scheduled for February, assuming all goes well.

[ndrosen]

I’m looking forward to it, and, by the way, it seems we’re both admirers of Yi Sun-sin.

[selenite0]

That guy deserves a movie.

[ndrosen]

There was a mini-series on South Korean television; one of my friends showed excerpts from it at a Georgist conference a few years back. I’ve heard that copies reached North Korea, to the government’s displeasure, because King Seonjo was portrayed as a fool, which could encourage people to doubt the wisdom of the PDRK’s current monarch.

[selenite0]

I'll have to keep an eye out for it.