The novel “Star of the Sea” by Una McCormack was published for the first time in 2016. It’s the fourth book of the Weird Space series and follows “The Baba Yaga“.
A few months have passed since Delia Walker went through a portal that connects our universe with that of the mysterious aliens known only as the Weird when a girl arrives claiming to be her daughter. For the people who knew the woman it’s difficult to accept a situation that seems impossible but on the planet Stella Maris it would be only one of the many oddities.
Stella Maris was already an anomaly, a world outside the Expansion where there was peace between humans and aliens, either Weird or Vetch. In the Expansion there are those who don’t accept that situation but what’s really happening? Even within the Expansion’s Intelligence agents believe different truths and being on the wrong side can be dangerous.
“Star of the Sea” directly follows “The Baba Yaga”, which Una McCormack wrote together with Eric Brown, who wrote on his own the first two novels of the Weird Space series. This fourth novel further expands the intrigue element introduced in the third novel offering some answers, but not all, to the many questions piled up during the series. My problem is that the answers are a bit vague and the twists show a series that’s quite uneven as it began as a very classic type of space opera, for better or for worse, and then was developed as a sort of great interstellar intrigue.
From the beginning of the series the political organization that rules the majority of human beings in the future thought by Eric Brown gave the impression of not being particularly democratic, from the third novel openly dystopic elements were developed. Actually the authors never really explained who the Expansion, as that government is known, works since in the various novels above all intelligence agents and military people appeared.
All these elements lead to a series of clashes between factions more or less uncovered following the conspiracy introduced in “The Baba Yaga” reaching a sort of conclusion in “Star of the Sea” that could also represent the end of series. However, there’s a lot that hasn’t yet been told in a series called Weird Space in which very little is known about the Weird aliens and in which villains rarely have a face and a name.
I don’t know what was the publisher’s plan when Eric Brown started the Weird Space series in which it seemed that the threat was created by the Weird aliens and the only complication was coming from the Vetch, with which humans had been at war. In retrospect the first two novels seem almost useless given the developments of “The Baba Yaga” and the fact that each novel adds new important characters leaving out important characters from the previous novel.
The last two novels have a greater homogeneity and at this point I can’t help thinking that the series would have been better if the intrigue element had been developed from the beginning. Maybe it’s an idea added by Una McCormack and in that case it seems like it arrived late.
Themes such as corruption in government agencies, control over the population and others could be developed better with parallels with the current situation, while “Star of the Sea” offers some development to the protagonists already present in “The Baba Yaga” but the subplots are told at a very fast pace quickly reaching a conclusion. The impression I had is that the author gave the story a conclusion that was rather hasty, also due to the fact that the novels of the Weird Space series are relatively short, around 300 pages each.
About two and a half years after the release of “Star of the Sea” I see no trace of new stories for the Weird Space series so I suspect the series has come to an end. This last novel makes sense as a conclusion but leaves various threads open. In my opinion, for the people who enjoyed the previous novels, it’s worth reading this one as well, otherwise even with the last books’ improvements the Weird Space series confirmed it’s targeted to readers looking for novels without many complications.
