As in Reynolds, the existence of a sentient mind in the workings of starships is unknown to owners and operators. This recalls the Conjoiner use of minds to run spaceships in Alastair Reynold’s Revelation Space series.
The vital information Jarek has taken from his sojourn on the planet Serenein is that the Sidhe use the brains of rare Sidhe/human hybrid youths to create the transit-kernel at the core of every starship. My recollection of the closing pages of Principles of Angels had more to do with explosions and narrow escapes than the nature of the City Manager, but his being a male Sidhe provides an explanation for several elements in this book. The recap also allows a dash of recasting of previous events, pulling the focus onto events that didn’t seem so important at the time. Within a couple of dozen pages, Fenn covers the back story and sets up the mission-a briskness sure to be appreciated both by those new to her writing and readers who need a brief reminder of the “key takeaways” from her previous novels. Following the only clue they have quickly leads them to Jarek, who escaped Sidhe imprisonment in Consorts of Heaven with a valuable secret and a cache of encrypted information.
Nual has spent years in hiding and Taro is on the run from the only world he has known. How exactly they might do that is, at first, unknown to Nual and Taro. Guardians of Paradise links up characters from the previous two novels and propels them to strike back at the Sidhe. The following Consorts of Heaven explains more about their former dominance over many human worlds, their defeat, their apparent extinction and their continuing, hidden existence, though its plot and characters are independent of the first novel. The book avoids any clear description of the Sidhe, relying more on our familiarity with that fey name. It also introduced Taro, a pseudo-Dickensian street kid who is caught up in a Sidhe attempt to kill one of their own kind, a renegade known as Nual. Principles of Angels presented an unusual world, where assassination is the formal mechanism of justice. It is a solid start to a writing career-not the spectacle that publicists hope for nor, in my opinion, the failure which some considered her earlier novels to be. Review: With Guardians of Paradise, Jaine Fenn is three novels into her Hidden Empireseries. Genre: science fiction/ psychological/ action
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