★★★☆☆ Picaresque with Hooloovoos

Ghostdrift

Suzanne Palmer

This review will be unfair to Suzanne Palmer's Ghostdrift, and that is my fault. I wasn't paying attention when I requested it and thus failed to notice that it is the fourth and last book of the Finder Chronicles, none of which I had previously read.

How big an issue is it to jump into a series in the middle, or even at the end? Usually people asked that question respond by discussing the plot. But of all the jump-in issues, the plot is the least important. More important are characters and, for speculative fiction, world-building. By the time you have finished three novels about Fergus Ferguson, the central character of the Finder Chronicles, you probably know him fairly well, and with any luck you like him and are happy to spend more time in his company. Furthermore, you know a great deal about the science-fictional galaxy he inhabits. Those were advantages I lacked.

I didn't feel that I lost a great deal by not having known Fergus. Fergus is pretty much a standard-issue picaro, so I know his type. On the other hand, though, not knowing the world was a problem. It isn't that it was difficult to follow -- instead, it was difficult to care. I haven't learned to care about the things that matter to Fergus and the people of Fergus's universe. This is one of those stories in which the universe is inhabited by hyperintelligent shades of the color blue (not literally -- those would be the Hooloovoos of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) some of whom patronize and essentially make pets of humans. Fergus has received the attention of at least one such species in previous books, and they show up here, too. They are not quite as annoying as Star Trek's Q, but they are still fairly obnoxious. The final third of the book is just deos ex machinis everywhere, the gods in question being not literal gods, but Hooloovoos. (OK, not literally them, either...)

So, bottom line: am I planning to get the previous three books and read them? No, I am not.

Thanks to NetGalley and DAW for an advance reader copy of Ghostdrift. Release date 28-May-2024.

Ghostdrift on Amazon

Goodreads review

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