This place is always awe-inspiring to me,” Jenna said quietly from the edge of the room, and Damien glanced up from the impossibly perfect model of the ship to look at her. “I don’t understand any of how what you do works, but this room…this is the key to the stars.”

“That was the Compact,” Damien half-whispered, reveling in the power pulsing around him. “Peace between Mage and Mundane, between Mars and Earth…and in exchange, we gave you the stars.”

On one hand, Starship’s Mage is (surprisingly?) hard sci fi. You have starship’s dealing with spin induced gravity, limits on acceleration so as not to crush your crew, and no¹ faster than light communication.

On the other hand, you have magic.

“Um, sir, what is that plaque supposed to do?” he asked, intentionally changing the subject.

“It’s a security spell,” the Captain explained, seizing on the topic change. “It detects if anyone enters the office with hostile intent.”

Damien traced the flow of energy through the runes and shook his head again. “You might want to have your senior Mage look at it,” he told the Captain. “The scribe used future imperative tenses instead of future-probabilistic. It’s actually slightly encouraging the chance of violence, not predicting it.”

It’s laced throughout the story in a relatively light way–especially considering that one of the main characters is a mage. But right where it counts? In the ability to actually travel faster than light? Well, that’s where magic comes into play.

It’s a weirdly fascinating idea and makes me want more of it. Just how many hijinks can you get up to, mixing scifi and fantasy?

Storywise, it’s quite the adventure, starting with pirates and a crew on the run and only escalating from there. The final three way chase/showdown is quite spectacular–only to drop one heck of a cliffhanger. It’s the sort that you could leave off and (mostly) have a solid standalone book, but at the same time leaves you wanting more. Which I do appreciate.

One gotcha that at first I thought I was going to be annoyed about was the idea that Damien was a special/one of a kind/chosen one mage. He could do things no other mage could do. I won’t go too far into it–spoilers!–but suffice it to say that he’s not the only ‘impossible’ thing in this universe… and the sequels promise more!

Overall, a fun story with some fascinating world building. And it’s for that alone that I want to read more. It turns out that there are already 18 books in this series (with another 60 from the other over the last decade and change). So we’ll have to see where it goes next!

Onward!

Side notes / fun thoughts:

We confirm five-kilometer separation and authorize main engine firing,” the controller informed him. “Cair vie, Blue Jay.”

“Na h-uile la gu math duit, Sherwood Prime,” Rice replied, the old Gaelic flowing smoothly off his tongue.

I do love languages. That’s very roughly saying ‘good luck/and good day to you’ so far as I very roughly understand. I … have no idea why they suddenly dropped in some Gaelic though. I do hope we get an answer for that.

Welcome to Heinlein Station, gentlemen,” she greeted them. “Your docking fees are paid up, but you’ll need to discuss station access fees and visitor’s insurance with one of our Intake Specialists.” She checked her wrist PC quickly and then gestured toward one of the cubicles. “Specialist Wan is available in office five. Please speak with her so we can get you into Heinlein as soon as possible.”

Heinlein! With apparently some interesting politics of his own.

“They also discovered what no one had guessed before that—that Excelsior had been inhabited before that. A technic civilization, one of a tiny handful we know of, had died when that black hole hit. They’d been a couple of centuries ahead of us—early twenty-second century in our nineteenth century—but without magic, they were unable to escape the death of their worlds.”

That got Damien’s attention. Humanity had discovered a total of five nonhuman intelligences. So far as the xenoanthropologists could determine, all had lacked critical biological or mineral resources to achieve anything resembling civilization—all of them were still at the hunter-gatherer level. Now that David mentioned it, though, he vaguely remembered something about a couple of dead technological alien races.

You… can’t just drop that and go nowhere else with it!

I wonder if they deal with this in another book in the series? I certainly hope so.

The idea that a great filter might just be the discovery of magic of all things? that’s a new one. 😄

Alaura froze.

“That isn’t possible,” she objected. “No analysis has ever found a pattern to jump flares.”

Like I said…

The bounty hunter stared at the silver-framed mirror in shock and awe.

“That’s impossible,” she whispered.

A whole universe of impossible things.