Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy discussion

This is our discussion of the story:


"Ten Rules for Being an Intergalactic Smuggler (The Successful Kind)" by Holly Black

You can read this story free on-line LightSpeed Magazine September 2014

This story is part of the The Best SF&F of the Year, vol 9 (2014) group anthology discussion.

Rule #1....fast ship
Rule #2....hot cargo
Rule #3....see rule #1 & #2

sounds like a fun story....

Spooky1947 wrote: "sounds like a fun story...."

As I recall it was.... you can read it on-line at LightSpeed Magazine September 2014.

(I'll re-read it before commenting further.)

That does sound like a fun read

★★★

Synopsis:
"Spaceports are dangerous.
Your uncle tells you this several times as you dock in the Zvezda-Spaceport, but it’s not like you don’t know it already. Your parents have told you a million stories about how alien races like the spidery and psychopathic Charkazaks – fugitives after their world was destroyed by InterPlanetary forces – take girls like you hostage and force you to do things so bad, they won’t even describe them.
"
A young girl stows away in her uncle's smuggler spaceship, fleeing her boring parents and planet. She needs to learn a lot of rules - the first one is "there are no rules", overcome her parent's prejudices against spaceports, aliens, and smugglers. Of course, everything is different.

Review: Yes, everything is different in a very predictable way. This rollicking story is narrated in second person which suggests a ironic distance and emotional distance from those 10 rules, like a self-help book or one of those 1980s Fighting Fantasy RPG books where you can choose what will happen next and go a different path through a story. It is a charming coming-of-age story mixed with a bit of bloods and guts, humor, and a lot of adventures - in fact everything you'd expect from a space opera: spaceships and ports, monsters, pirates, smugglers. Nothing new but I loved the narrative structure.

This was fun. I'm not wild about second person narration, but I think here it adds a veneer of freshness to the enjoyable-if-mostly-predictable plot. (Some writers would -- and I think have -- taken hundreds of pages or even multiple books to develop the kind of relationship that's established here in a few paragraphs. This story leaves me thinking that I'd like to read this new partnership's future adventures.)

Another story about a young girl. 4 for 4. Going to have to find a new name for this anthology....

I first read this one in Lightspeed last year. Liked it then, liked it now.

It's the structure of "Ten Rules for Being an Intergalactic Smuggler" that makes it interesting. There's a linear story being told, about a girl runs away from home by stowing away her smuggler-uncle's spaceship, but each chapter in the story is introduced by a "rule" about to be illustrated (many of them quite situation-specific.) The structure as a sense of amusement and makes the overall story light (not that the story is especially deep, but it does have an awful lot of people getting killed, often by evisceration.)

There is some delicious satire in the history of the legendary bogeyman Charkazaks:

"[Charkazaks] were so awful that they wouldn’t follow InterPlanetary laws regarding who it was okay to kill and who it wasn’t, nor did they believe in things like surrender or mercy.... When Centurions were dispatched to discipline the Charkazaks, they fought back with such viciousness that the only way to keep them from overrunning the galaxy was the obliteration of their planet and all the Charkazaks on it."

They didn't obey the rules of war, so we went all genocidal. It put me in mind of the old Vietnam War era remark, "it became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it."


Hillary wrote: "I'm not wild about second person narration, but I think here it adds a veneer of freshness to the enjoyable-if-mostly-predictable plot...."

Not a big fan of 2nd person, either. I think what makes it work here is the "rules" structure. We're used to seeing 2nd-person in these advice column type lists. The explanation of each rule goes on a little longer than your typical, "five ways to save money," column, but it's a familiar use of the PoV.

★★★★

Andreas forgot his stars on this one.

G33z3r wrote: "Andreas forgot his stars on this one."
/edited :)