Review: Under Fortunate Stars

Under Fortunate Stars by Ren Hutchings
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

There's a lot to like here. The editing, even in the pre-release version from Netgalley, was well above average. The main characters are distinct and well developed, both in backstory flashbacks and in the course of the main storyline, and they face varied challenges that test them, showing courage, determination and skill, and risking their lives for the greater good. All of that is exactly what I look for in a book.

Unfortunately, for me, all of this good stuff was countered by a huge problem: the fortunate coincidences. The title really isn't kidding.

Now, having one large fortunate coincidence that allows the plot to happen is a fault, but if everything else is good - and here, it is - I can forgive it. A large fortunate coincidence about every 10 or 15 pages, on the other hand, goes from a fault to a fatal flaw. And lampshading it by having characters talk about how lucky and miraculous it is that they have exactly the equipment, skills, knowledge, and people they need to make a highly unlikely and contingent escape from what amounts to a large sealed room in subspace - that doesn't help at all.

If the author hides a get-out-of-jail-free card up their sleeve and surreptitiously plays it at a key moment, that's cheating. But if the author openly writes out 40 or 50 new get-out-of-jail-free cards right there on the table in front of you and plays them every time the plot hits a problem... I don't even know what to call that.

I'll give an example in spoiler tags from a subsidiary part of the plot. (view spoiler)[The characters, in two ships, have been pulled into a subspace rift from different times and places - already a big swallow as a premise, but it allows an interesting story. By fortunate coincidence, a space station has also been pulled into the rift. By fortunate coincidence, there are no crew on it to worry about; it's been abandoned because (by fortunate coincidence) it had a rare kind of detector that could sense the rift coming, even though the people on the station didn't know what it was. By fortunate coincidence, one of the people who was staffing the station at the time it was abandoned is part of the crew of one of the ships, having (by coincidence that isn't fortunate for her, but is for the plot) been discharged from the quasi-military station's crew and given a new background because she delayed obeying the evacuation order and then crashed, killing a colleague, and having by complete random selection chosen the job she now has. By fortunate coincidence, the other ship contains a pair of hackers who already know how to do an exploit that will turn her station login - which, by fortunate coincidence, has never been cancelled, since her disciplinary hearing took place after the station vanished - into exactly what they need in order to get some resources from the station which, by fortunate coincidence, will enable them to escape from the rift. (By fortunate coincidence, their crew includes a subspace physicist who was working on exactly the kind of thing that will enable them to figure out a way to escape and execute it using the station's batteries and some other resources they also, by fortunate coincidence, have.) I'm not even going to describe the several more fortunate coincidences (at least six) that confront the former station crew member with her past trauma and enable her to overcome it, and also to escape the station when things go pear-shaped, and also to ultimately get what she really wants. That's about 17 fortunate coincidences, by my count, in this subplot alone, and there are plenty more in the rest of the book. By the time a character opens his junk drawer and pulls out exactly the piece of rare alien technology without which their plan has no chance of success, having obtained it by a highly unlikely series of events involving, at minimum, three fortunate coincidences, I wasn't even surprised anymore, just disappointed. (hide spoiler)]

It reads, to me, as if the plot wasn't outlined in advance but written by the seat of the pants. That's absolutely fine, and it can produce excellent stories - if the author unfolds the story organically from the initial seed of the situation, setting, and characters, rather than continually pulling things out of a location quite close to the seat of the pants in order to goose the plot back on track every time it becomes difficult. It seems like she's not even embarrassed about it, and she absolutely should be.

Incidentally, the blurb (as at the date I read it) claims that it's a "modern, progressive homage to classic space opera stories". As far as I can tell, this claim is made because two minor characters are a gay couple and two viewpoint characters are bisexual, which doesn't make much difference to anything. It's set far enough into the future that human names have all changed and you can't tell ethnicity from them; I think someone might have been described as brown-skinned once, but race is basically not a thing, and you could read any given character as whatever race you like. I can think of plenty of books that have more diverse characters and don't make a specific "progressive" claim.

Anyway: If continual massive luck in place of competent plotting is not a dealbreaker for you, this is otherwise a good book. But it was a dealbreaker for me, so much so that an otherwise four-star book drops all the way down to two stars.

View all my reviews