The Jupiter Pirates, Book One:
Hunt for the Hydra. By Jason Fry. Harper. $6.99.
The Jupiter Pirates, Book Two:
Curse of the Iris. By Jason Fry. Harper. $16.99.
Famed Italian director,
producer and designer Franco Zeffirelli once described opera as “a planet where
the muses work together, join hands and celebrate all the arts.” That is a
pleasantly elegant evaluation, but when “opera” (of a sort) takes place out
among other planets, matters are
considerably less, well, lofty. This is the genre of space opera – more
accurately, a subgenre of science fiction; more accurately still, a subgenre of
fantasy. If science fiction is a form of speculation about things that might
someday be, fantasy is about things that never could be, and the tropes of
space opera fall squarely into the latter category, violating known scientific
principles frequently and with aplomb in the service of old-fashioned
good-vs.-evil stories that just happen to take place in outer space. There is
some excellent space opera out there, both in books and in other media – the
first three Star Wars movies are a
fine example – but most space opera, with its well-defined roles and
one-dimensional characters zipping here and zapping there, is much less
distinguished.
Space opera can, however,
work rather well for adventure-hungry preteens, and it is they at whom Jason
Fry’s sequence, The Jupiter Pirates,
is aimed. Strangely, the series title is at odds with the series concept, since
the central characters make clear repeatedly that they are not pirates but privateers, operating under a “letter of
marque” in service to the government of the Jovian Union, which is in a kind of
Cold War standoff with the government based on Earth. True, there were Jupiter pirates once, and – as is
usual in space opera – there are some remnants of the old days and old ways
around, notably including Huff Hashoone, cyborg patriarch of the family whose
adventures Fry is chronicling in books whose first entry is now available in
paperback and whose second carries things considerably farther in several ways.
Space-opera characters tend
to have vaguely space-sounding names, so in addition to the pirate-sounding
Huff (who actually says things such as “avast” and “arr”), Fry gives us
protagonist Tycho Hashoone, Huff’s grandson; Tycho’s twin sister, Yana; their
older brother, Carlo (not very space-y, that
name); their mother, Diocletia, captain of the good spaceship Shadow Comet; their father, Mavry; the
usual devoted below-decks warrant officer, Mr. Grigsby (who gets lines such as,
“Guns are hot”); and the equally usual, imperturbable shipboard central
computer, Vesuvia. Hunt for the Hydra
throws these characters and some others into a far-flung (of course far-flung) series of close calls that involve trying to
keep the family privateer business going while evading the clutches both of
Earth-based ships and of slimy Earth-based “diplomats” (who may or may not be
legitimate) and Earth-based political schemers who pull the “diplomats’”
strings. Tycho and Yana are 12 during this adventure, and Carlo is 16; and the
one unusual element of the series involves the siblings’
cooperative-but-competitive lives, because they must work together as crew to
support the ship but are also in competition to determine which of them will
eventually become the next captain of the Shadow
Comet.
The first book ends in a way
that shows the weaknesses of space opera in general and Fry’s series in
particular. The Hashoones have a confrontation with a former Huff Hashoone
pirate colleague who is also now largely an agglomeration of machine parts and
who bears the unusually silly name of Thoadbone Mox. He is thoroughly evil,
scheming and backstabbing and not above betraying his fellow pirates (or anyone
else) and killing without conscience. So after the Hashoones defeat and corner
him, Huff lets him go in tribute to
the fact that the two of them are real pirates, not some sort of half-baked
“privateer.” This sort of thing does happen in space opera – and in much of the
earthbound fiction from which it grew, such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island – but the problem here
is that Huff’s decision leads directly, in Curse
of the Iris, to the deaths of a number of Shadow Comet crew members. And there is no sign that Huff,
Diocletia or anyone else even makes the connection, much less cares about it:
for all the “we’re in this together” pronouncements the Hashoones make to the
crew, most crew members (Mr. Grigsby excepted) are no more than disposable
parts. Curse of the Iris is a better
book than Hunt for the Hydra, the
tricky ins and outs of a far-flung (again, of
course far-flung) search for a treasure that may or may not exist dredging up
a secrets of family secrets that allow Fry to start fleshing out the three
young Hashoones’ character while showing that the Hashoone family line may not
be quite so heroic and untainted as it seemed to be in the first book. Tycho
becomes more-central in the second novel than he was in the first, being forced
to keep a big secret from his parents and siblings and also showing
compassionate instincts beyond anything exhibited by Yana or Carlo – a clear
plus for him in the potential-captain race, although Fry may twist things so
that Tycho decides his destiny lies outside direct inheritance of the family’s
business line. One thing about space opera is that, in the absence of
scientific strictures, it can go pretty much anywhere an author wishes, and The Jupiter Pirates is showing signs of
being able to go quite some distance (the second book already has the Jovian
Union itself starting to fracture, as people based near Saturn start to assert their independence). Fry paces the books
well and writes in a clear, easy-to-read style that should interest fans of the
far-flung for a number of books to come, even though there is nothing
genre-breaking (or subgenre-breaking) here..
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