Star Well

 
 

Star Well

by Alexei Panshin

Ace

1968

 

 

Star Well is a short space opera from 1968. At just over 150 pages, it straddles the line between novella and novel. It's not exactly YA, but probably what scifi authors at the time would've called a 'juvenile.' It's also the first book in a trilogy. A friend I like talking about scifi with read it recently, so I decided to give it a go too.

 
Star Well is an asteroid with a space station inside. Villiers is a nobleman seemingly just hanging out there, enjoying a bit of casino gambling and fine dining during an extended layover between legs of an interstellar voyage. Villiers meets a naive young Naval officer who's trying to investigate Star Well for evidence of smuggling. By chance, the two criminals who run the place and are smuggling suspect Villiers of investigating them, rather than the young officer. (Probably because Villiers is the one who seems remotely competent...)

 
A new ship arrives in port, carrying some teenage girls en route to a noblewomen's finishing school, the Navy investigator in charge of figuring out what's going on in Star Well, who's undercover disguised as a priest, and a fur-covered alien frog who seems to be friends with Villiers. One of the finishing school girls comes from a family of con artists, and since Villiers is a friend of her family, she gets him to buy her dinner. While they're out, one of criminal station managers challenges Villiers to a duel.

 
This is the real set piece of the book, and Panshin has fun drawing it out. First we see, from the girl's perspective, Villiers getting rushed off to the fight, her being unable to keep up or get herself let in, then thinking that Villiers has been killed, and then getting in trouble by stumbling upon some smuggling in action. Then we see the actual duel from the perspective of the criminal, and credit to Panshin, he writes action well, not trying to choreograph every move, but giving a real sense of the shape of the action and the mood of the fight. And then we see the perspective of someone who secretly intervened, which lends new meaning to what we saw in the duel itself. All this manages to be exciting, and at times suspenseful.

 
After that, there's the only small matters of the kidnapped girl and the two Naval officers trying to catch the smugglers in the act and arrest them left to take care of.

 
I like Panshin's narration in this book. He's really chatty at the start of each chapter, cynical about the operation of Imperial power, the vapidity of hereditary nobility and jealousy of those who have money but can't buy status, cynical but not pessimistic. The narrative voice reminds me of other old books for children. The young Naval officer and one of the criminal henchmen are also both very unworldly and childlike, which I also associate with media meant for kids.

 
The fake priest is follower of Mithra; the same religion as in the show Raised by Wolves. In both cases it's used as a futuristic substitute for Christianity. The frog alien also has an interesting a-causal philosophy, a view that every person is traveling along a line that coincidentally brings them close to others. But things happen because that's the shape of the line, not because one thing caused another. What Panshin's describing here is a kind of determinism that depends on the idea of time as a spatial dimension - kind of secretly sophisticated for a YA book!