Flight of the Vajra

by Serdar Yegulalp

Space opera. Rebooted.

At first they were only three. A brilliant starship designer, haunted by the death of his loved ones. A spiritual leader whose faith could transform mankind... or destroy it. A precocious acrobat girl, looking for a new family of her own.

Then came others. An entertainer and playboy whose dissolute lifestyle conceals unexpected ambitions, courtesy of a lover who represents the galaxy's most powerful worlds. And a pair of detectives--one barely human, the other not at all--with orders to enlist all their help solving a crime that threatens civilization.

Together they formed the crew of the ever-evolving spacecraft Vajra. Seven against a universe where the boundaries between matter and mind have been torn down, where one can wield the power of billions ... and where humanity must choose between rebirth or annihilation

Genres: Science Fiction

783 pages, ebook

First published August 19, 2013

About the author

"Only connect!" -- E.M. Forster

Reviews

[Steven Savage · Rating 5 out of 5]

First of all, a fair warning - I edited the first draft of this book. That being said, it was actually an enjoyable experience it didn't feel like work. I've been long craving good space opera, and this delivers it - rebooted.

Rush ahead to a far future where humanity is among the stars (and apparently the only sentient species), in a society driven by reconfigurable "protonomics" - self-programming matter. Literally everything is a computer and a construction set, most people are at least marginally wired to a far-flung communication network, and among the many scattered worlds (habitable planets are at a premium) are many diverse cultures - and a large split between the Old Way people who prefer less modified lives and cultures of humans who are heavily wired, engineered, and enhanced.

Now enter Henré Sim, starship designer, who lost his best friend, wife, daughter, and career in a massive starship accident - on a ship he designed. With a ruined career, a large legal settlement, and a hole in his life he wanders vaguely among worlds hoping to find an answer to what happened on his perfect, tested-and-retested creation. Of course his real goal slowly fades and his life has turned into mostly wandering and drinking and avoiding any entanglements.

Of course that can't last forever, and when he visits a planet known for it's adherence to the Old Way, he makes friends with a futuristic circus performer and finds himself called upon by the leader of the Old Way itself to design a most unique starship - and then assassination, violence, and political intrigue become part of his previously vagabond life. As he finds himself drawn into a complex web of intrigue, so are others; a gender-shifting rock star, two futuristic police who have data that may solve his family's death, sleazy technology archivists, and more. Soon Henré Sim is far, far more entangled than he ever expected - he started with more questions than answers, but sometimes it's far worse when you have more answers than questions.

Cultural changes, conspiracies, and rogue technologies are out there, and a lot is coming apart at the seams. Fortunately Henré Sim is an engineer, and he's very good at putting things together . . .

Flight of the Vajra is a giant, sprawling space adventure that is alive with tiny details that bring it to life. There's a planet big on genetic engineering but that occasionally means some of their more off-kilter members are "dishonorably exported" to other lives. Reprogrammable clothes become unexpected weapons. Automatic brain backups have unusual side effects. Yet among all this it really is a story of the characters, and the cast is delightful - there's going to be at least one character you want to find out more about.

Best of all, this is SF that goes back to the smart characters who do smart things - indeed, some of the worst things that happen are because very smart people are on different side. It's often an escalating chess-game of actions and witty dialogue and high technology that move the story forward.

Ultimately, the most humorous way I found to describe it is "A more responsible version of Tony Stark finds he's got to save the galaxy - and his team consists of a circus acrobat, a futuristic Dali Lama, Jim Gordon, Seven of Nine, and David Bowie." That only just begins to scratch the surface of the wild ride that awaits you here.

[JHM · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a very pleasant surprise. It had no reviews on Amazon, and wasn't even in the GoodReads database when I started -- but I'm optimistic that it will become better known. It's very well-written and has engaging characters -- the two most important factors in my enjoyment of any story. It also had several at first disparate plotlines that gradually came together in the end, which always makes for a satisfying read.

In fact, although I read the book as a Kindle loan, I've gone back and purchased it. I don't know how soon I'll read it again, but I though the author deserved some compensation for all the work he put into this very enjoyable and thought-provoking read.

"Flight of the Vajra" has several layers: the personal development of the three primary characters, a mystery-sabotage-investigation plot, and a conflict - both illustrated and explicitly debated - between two contrasting lifestyles: Highend and Old Way. Personally, I enjoyed the way the three streams interwove, but I'm not sure that everyone would enjoy the long conversations between the characters on all three topics. *I* enjoyed them, but much about this book hit close to home.

The heart of the book is its exploration of personal connection, meaning, and the trade-offs inherent in any lifestyle choices. The story is set up to bias the reader in favor of the Old Way as a viable, even superior choice, but Yegulalp ultimately pulls no punches about the sometimes painful consequences of that choice -- which is another strength of the book.

I'd give the story 4.5 stars, but have to round down to 4 because the one weakness is in the villains. Yegulalp does a lovely job with his protagonist team. They unfold gradually as individuals, growing and changing along the way. They come across as real people. The villains, on the other hand, seem over-the-top in their broad-stroke nastiness. The final showdown does come across as the inevitable manisfestation of the technology and the contrasting lifestyles -- but at the same time it felt more like something out of a comic book than the detailed world of the rest of the story. I would have liked a bit more nuance to and insight into the Bad Guys.

It's hard to do "Vajra" real justice in a review. You can read the summary in the book description, and the plot is too intricate to spell out. I can only say that it works well as adventurous speculative/science fiction and as a philosophical reflection on the choices we make as human beings and what their consequences are to our humanity itself.

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Serdar Yegulalp, Flight of the Vajra (Genji Press, 2013)

I had planned on starting this review out with a paragraph about how I don't normally read science fiction blah blah blah boring boring. But then it occurred to me that unless you're reading this at Popcorn for Breakfast, in which case you may be reading it because of the reviewer rather than the subject, you probably are a science-fiction reader, and so anything I would have to say in that vein will probably be obvious to you anyway, so just imagine I bored you senseless with a hundred fifty words about how the last sci-fi book I read and enjoyed was years ago and all that nonsense. And I can skip to the final sentence, which is “so even if you're not a big science fiction fan, that should not stop you from checking out a copy of Flight of the Vajra.”

Henré Sim, as we open, is rich, famous, and celebrating the launch of his newest, biggest, and most luxurious spacecraft, the Kyritan, with his best friend (Cavafy), wife (Biann), and young daughter (Yezmé). The unthinkable happens, the equivalent of the Kyritan striking that iceberg in the north Atlantic, and Henré is one of the few survivors. Fast-forward five years. Henré has turned his back on everything he once held dear, from spacecraft design to religion, and is living the dissolute life thanks to a legal settlement that will allow him to do so for the rest of his life. Or, at least, that is what he is allowing everyone to think; he has never stopped believing the Kyritan disaster was sabotage, and poking discreetly under every lawless rock he can find to see if he can come up with any leads. To that end, he sets down on Cytheria, a planet devoted to his old religion, the Old Way (think “luddites” here and you're not terribly far wrong). As Henré tells us at the beginning of the first chapter, “There were two circuses in town shortly after I arrived on Cytheria.” One of them is an actual circus; the other is a conference being held by the Kathaya, the spiritual head of the Old Way. Henré gets himself entangled in both. One by coincidence; he's walking down the street, turns a corner, and almost literally runs into Enid Sulley, a circus performer who's bored with life on the road and wants something different. One not: Angharad, the current Kathaya, has discovered Henré is planetside and has asked for an audience. When Enid finds out, she asks to come along, and the three of them find themselves thrown together after an assassination attempt on Angharad. Not surprisingly, the IPS (Interplanetary Police Service, if memory serves) takes notice, and the three of them are collared by two officers named Kallhander and Ioné and taken for interrogation. Henré has a healthy disrespect for authority and initially resists, but Kallhander tempts Henré with what he's been looking for all this time—the signature of an explosion elsewhere on Cytheria at the same time as the attempt on Angharad's life is an almost perfect match for the signature of the Kyritan explosion. Henré may finally have a lead.

...but the main mystery here turns out to be only a very small part of this doorstop-sized (768pp.) tome; Yegulalp's tagline here is “space opera. rebooted.”, and man, does he ask a lot of epic-level questions. There's enough meat on these bones for most authors to have turned out a trilogy, or something even larger than that. All of them, minor spoiler alert, are answered more than satisfactorily; I was following along with the writing of this book on Yegulalp's blog, as I've been a fan of his various media projects for years now (while I didn't add a “full disclosure” at the top because we've never met in the flesh, we've been friends on the Internet since the days when Serdar was doing music under various names back in the late nineties), and where this is the place I would usually speculate about how much time an author spent thinking about the ramifications of that particular “what if?” nexus, in this case, I know the answer—and you can too by pointing yourself over to Genji Press and checking out the blog, though it won't take you three years to get from genesis to book release. More importantly, perhaps, Yegulalp asks all the right questions, and does it in such a way as to make a number of universal themes still seem almost unpredictable. (I know I should have seen that climax coming from a mile away, but it still blind-sided me.)

That said, and I hasten to add that all of this is minor and can be written off as set decoration if you're in the mood, this is space opera, and that comes with a few drawbacks. Yegulalp was trying for not only the structure, but the mood as well, which leads to some amusingly purple prose, especially towards the beginning of the book, as well as a penchant for cliffhangers. (I will warn you now—you do not want to start Chapter Twenty-Seven when you're half an hour away from a movie screening, because you will want to tear your hair out at not being able to go on to Chapter Twenty-Eight for two hours.) There's also a case of what I've come to call “the Absalom, Absalom! house”, after the famous Faulkner structure whose manufacture changes from stone to wood in said novel; Angharad, we are told, is the Fourteenth Supreme Kathaya of the Old Way at Location 14435 (sorry for the Location numbers, I did consume this in ebook rather than paperback form), but the Sixteenth Supreme Kathaya of the Old Way back in Location 14013. I rush to add that (a) I don't take points off for that sort of thing (because if Faulkner occasionally slipped up...), and (b) there is always the idea in the back of my mind that some authors throw in things like this on purpose just to see if anyone's paying attention, so I find them amusing more than anything. And all I had to say in this paragraph is of the niggle variety anyway; anything that can be labelled as a drawback where Flight of the Vajra is concerned is dwarfed by the sheer number of things the book gets right. Even if you're not a fan of the wide, sweeping universal vista—and like I said before, I'm really not (that last sci-fi book I loved? Greg Bear's Blood Music, which IIRC I read in 1988)—this is one I would have a hard time recommending highly enough. Yes, it's big, and you will probably spend more time on it than any other novel you will read this year. It's worth every minute. A shoo-in for my Best Reads of the Year list. ****