Review: Velocity Weapon by Megan O’Keefe

This is a tough one to write about without giving spoilers. Even to say that it is a book with multiple twists and surprises will reshape how you read it. I had seen a lot of praise for the book but I hadn’t read anything about its content and there were at least two twists that I believe I would have anticipated if I’d know it was a book with substantial twists. So there you go, I may have spoiled it already.

In a remote star system the human colonised planets of Ada Prime and Icarion are heading to war. Prime is a system-spanning hegemonic power with a commercial monopoly over inter-stellar gates and the people of Icarion are bristling against the economic power of Prime in general and the local arm of Prime in particular.

Sergeant Sanda Greeve of Ada Prime finds herself waking up onboard an Icarion spaceship after apparently being rescued from a space battle. She’s lost her leg and the spaceship is apparently deserted… Meanwhile in another plot line, her brother Biran Greeve, has just graduated to the lofty position of Keeper. The Keeper’s of Prime have an embedded chip in the brains which keep portions of the technical secrets behind the gateways. They also form a kind of inner-party that rules the Prime society across multiple star systems. On learning that his sister has gone missing after a space skirmish, he uses all his influence to try and get her back.

Meanwhile, meanwhile…on a wholly different star system, a criminal street gang is busy planning to rob a cache of illegal drugs but inadvertently stumble on something else.

The initial set-up seemed very odd to me. There was an odd contrast to the kind of high-space opera framing of Icarion versus Ada Prime and the more near-future cyberpunk aspect of the third plot line. However, as the backstory is revealed, the contrast between the interstellar level of the civilisation and its more contemporary to our times society becomes clearer in a series of interludes in which we learn how humanity acquires advanced space travel. Similarly, plot holes and what appear to be inconsistent statements by character, inevitably resolve into revelations and connections between people that were less than coincidental.

This is part 1 of a multiple part story and while you’ll have discovered a lot of things by the end of the book, the story is very far from resolved. It’s certainly a gripping (indeed grippy) book, with short chapters and multiple shifts between cliff-hangers and sudden revelations. It throws up many themes about artificial intelligence, politics and maintaining a galaxy spanning society but it never really addresses any of them — mainly because there is so very much going on.

I probably shouldn’t have read this directly after A Memory Called Empire. Utterly different books but they have a weird overlap in details and settings that make them feel like the two authors were given the same set of prompts and things to include and then sent off to write a space-opera.

I listened to the audiobook version narrated by Joe Jameson. I’m mainly doing audio books currently while I go for walks or other exercise to compensate for the absence of my normal amount of walking about with work.