Deep Black is the much-anticipated sequel to one of my favourite SF books in recent years, Artifact Space (review HERE.)

I had high hopes for this one. In my review of Artifact Space, I said that “Artifact Space made my inner Spacer beam. It starts fast but held my attention throughout, bringing new ideas to traditional SF. This is a paean to all the old SFnal tropes of old but with a brand spanking new upgrade. I couldn’t put it down. Simply brilliant and easily one of my books of the year.”.

The general plot up to here is fairly simple. Marca Nbaro has managed to illegally work her way onto the Athens, one of the city-sized Greatships from the Directorate of Human Corporations (DHC) that travel along a trade route from City to Trade Point.

In Artifact Space when the Greatship New York is destroyed, the DHC comes under threat, by the PTX, a group of renegades determined to stop their monopoly of trade and destroy the DHC. There is a battle between the Athens and the PTX who are determined to hijack the Athens, but it is repelled by Marca and the rest of the Athens crew.

Marca also finds herself meeting the Hin, a starfish-like, nitrogen breathing alien species that is happy to trade xenoglas with humans. It is the first human-Starfish direct contact in over 200 years.

Deep Black picks up immediately where Artifact Space finishes. (And yes, even with my brief summary you would be best reading that book first before this one.) SPOILER WARNING: As a result, there are spoilers about the first book in this review of the second.

In Deep Black the Athens finds herself becoming more militaristic as the Greatship manoeuvres into less known space – the Deep Black of the title. This is to find and destroy the renegades who attacked the DHC before, but also to follow the Hin.

Now a hero of the Battle of Trade Point, Marca Nbaro now continues to juggle all the elements of her life – new technical innovations, aliens and hostile humans, manage to cope with management status, develop a relationship with a boyfriend and cope with her own feelings of inadequacy and incompetency. She’s also coming to terms with the use of a neural lace, which as her skills develop allow a better link to Morosini, the ship’s AI and gives her an advantage in combat.

But in-between the battles there are also long stretches of time, often involving manoeuvring along the trade route. There’s less planet-hopping and more time simply in an enclosed environment on the ship this time. Much of the plot then becomes about what to do when in-between engagements in this restricted environment. Frankly, there’s not a lot of variety in what you can do here, although Miles does well to keep Marca busy – perhaps too much so.

Others have mentioned it with Artifact Space, but Nbaro’s ability to be everywhere, doing everything is even more noticeable in this book. I must admit that Marca going in a seemingly-constant cycle, from fighting to training to directing the spaceship’s flight to practice and then to strategic meetings AND have visits to the boyfriend (and repeat in varying combinations) bordered on the edge of Marca being superhuman – it is understandable that Marca complaining all the time of being tired.

Whilst I accept that such times call for desperate measures, there were moments when I wondered what the rest of the crew do, and whether someone should step in and reduce Marca’s duties for the sake of her own mental health. I guess that this is a sign of having characters you care about.

Of course, the book is not just about Marca. I thought that the development of communication between the humans and the Hin was well done and unsurprisingly becomes an integral part of the plot.

Similarly, whilst it is not simple, the mechanics of combat in ultrahigh speeds has clearly had some thought. Miles seems to be following the science here and uses it well, even when my non-scientific brain found following the detailed mathematical processes and strategies a little perplexing! As an updating of the Captain Hornblower-type sea battles it works very well, so much so that I felt that there was even a David Weber/Honor Harrington kind of vibe, which some readers will appreciate.

I also thought that it was interesting to see how much of the action is controlled by computer, although it is understandable. Miles drops in an element of uncertainty in the plot by having Nbaro ponder over the trustworthiness of AI – is it genuinely working for the benefit of Mankind, or does it have a deeper, more sinister aim?

Taking the thought further, Nbaro at one point wonders whether the intense and complex fighting she and the Athens is involved in is actually nothing more than rival AI’s competing each other. Humans serving AI’s whims? Interesting.

But the main hook of the book is seeing the growth of Nbaro as a person aboard a near militaristic Greatship and watching her deal with every challenge she is given. Of course that is what she does, and I think why this book keeps you reading.

In summary, Deep Black is a worthy conclusion to what has come before. I must admit I didn’t find it quite as engaging as last time, being mainly set in an enclosed space and with some quite technical strategic explanation, but the relationships between humans and aliens, not to mention the combat scenes kept me reading. Despite my grumbles, it is still one of the best military SF books out there, and I think will certainly be one of my books of the year.

I've been waiting on Deep Black for a while. Ever since I finished Artifact Space, honestly, at which point I shook my fist and demanded a sequel, ideally immediately. Well, immediately it wasn't, but the sequel is here, wrapping up the story that the first book began: Marca Nbaro is having her first eventful cruise aboard the Greatship Athens, trading with mysterious aliens for technology and materials we barely pretend to understand. Nbaro grew by leaps and bounds in the first story, rising from her beginnings in an orphanage to something like a talisman, getting to live to her full potential in service to the Service. Of course to do that she had to deal with an espionage ring and the aforesaid mysterious aliens.
This second book opens where the first left off. With the Athens meeting some weird and wonderful starfish-aliens, and trading them all sorts of knickknacks for their own goods. And I'll say this for Deep Black. It's not afraid to start looking at the aliens that underpin the economy of interstellar human civilisation. We've heard a little bit about the Starfish, but this is seeing them up close, as Nbaro and the rest of the crew try to work out how to extract as much alien tech as possible for as little outlay as possible. This is, after all, a merchant voyage. But it's also a voyage that shows us a crew trying to understand the alien. Trying to see where they come from, and what it is that they want all our stuff for, and find a way to communicate. Those efforts are slow, and stumbling, but you can feel the small victories, and the potential for shattering consequences that they evoke. And the Starfish remain impressively opaque, with drives and responses that seem to sit at an odd angle to our own. They're fun to read. This is a universe populated by the strange. Speaking of which, there are rumblings of other aliens making an appearance as well (as seen in the interstitial short story collection Beyond the Fringe), and their agenda and world view is likely to change everything again.

The book manages to make all of this work by taking the high concept stuff - the galaxy-spanning humanity, the distinctly odd alien cultures, and grounding it in what feels suspiciously like 16th century Venice, but with faster-than-light travel. The Athens is a massive, brutally elegant tool, staffed by tens of thousands of people, all of whom are, after months or years in the middle of nowhere, busy politicking or screwing or feuding just trying to find a decent cup of coffee. They're our grounding influence, in their messy humanity, in their enmities and in their friendships and in their love perhaps most of all. They're good people. And, you know, also, they learn to fight hand-to hand, they fly space-fighters, and they do, sometimes, blow shit up real good. Because this is a world that fights slow, real wars in space, where getting everyone in the same place at the same time is hard, but throwing a bunch of kilometers-long railgun slugs at them once you do is reasonably easy. Deep Black has more of a focus on the xeno-culture than its predecessor, but worry not. It's still full of tense space-navy warfare, and harsh, kinetic and bloodily immediate combat, on the "ground" and in the air - all described with compulsive prose that leaves a taste of iron and gunpowder in your mouth.

Nbaro is as much of a joy to read as ever, incidentally. If you're here for competence-as-a-service, she can hook you up. There's a sense that she's grown more as a person than at the start of the first book. Here she's thrown into the deep end of trying to be a grown-up officer in what's definitely not a space navy (it absolutely is).Buried beneath watch reports and Science! and trying to fly a space-fighter and maybe also learn to be an engineer and and and. But underneath that is a vulnerability and a humanity that show us she's not just a hyper-competent plot-magnet. She's someone trying to understand what's going on, what she wants, and where her friends and her career fit in a world slowly tilting out of the known, and into something different, whether or not it's better. I've always liked her for being intelligent and brave, but seeing her run into the edges of her own personality, and need to think things through, was a delight - working on her own need to be at the front, to be seen and a hero, and yet also somehow not end up dead. And she's surrounded by some delightful supporting characters. Including the mostly-not-that-bad shipmind AI, and also her long term crush who may reciprocate her feelings, and her roommate, who has her own problems. The book wants to spend more time with some than others, but I liked the way it dealt with the issues it did have time to explore - love, loss, and dealing with the sometimes permanent consequences of a life spent at hazard. I would've liked to give them all a little more room to breathe - sometimes there's a cavalcade of names and faces and they don't get as much flavour as I'd prefer, in between the world-building and the world-exploding. But that said, the book's already big enough, and honestly I was always going to want more anyway.

The story? Well. If I can paraphrase Blackadder, it twists and turns like a...twisty turny thing. I will say that you naval warfare fans and you ground-pounders, there's plenty for you. But there's romance in here too, little sparks of joy in the dark. There's tense negotiation and catharsis and blood on the decks. There's epic space battles, and sometimes there's just training and coffee and trying to make it to the next thing before you fall over. There's being the one who shows up, the one who cares. This is high concept space opera, with a gritty feel to it, a feel of flight decks stained with oil and blood, but with some smart ideas hiding behind the explosions. This is, in short, a fine sequel, and a fine conclusion to the series.

P.S. I will say that there was some nice extra context made available in Beyond the Fringe reviewed last time, which I encourage everyone to give a read. It's not necessary but it certainnly adds some interesting facets to an already complex tale.