Five Twelfths of Heaven

[sawyl]

Another of Liz Bourke's recommendations in the form of Melissa Scott's Five Twelfths of Heaven, a space opera from the mid-80s. where starships are flown using celestial music, FTL navigation involves imposing an allegorical view on purgatory, and magi are a Real Thing.

The action begins with Silence Leigh losing her ship when her feckless uncle fails to make it to court in time. Unable to plead for herself, thanks to absurdly sexist rules of the Hegemony, Silence is forced to accept the help of a passing captain called Denis Balthasar. In return for his help, Balthasar offers Silence a job piloting his ship. He also proposes that he, she, and his engineer enter into a marriage of convenience in order to gain citizenship of a friendly planet. After a certain amount of thought, Silence agrees.

But all does not go well for the crew of the Sun Treader when their patrons, the Wrath-of-God polity formed by a group of former pirates, decide to go to war against the Hegemony. The plan is a total fiasco and the crew barely escape with their lives — although Silence learns something new and strange about herself in the process. Forced to crew for the Hegemony, they manage to slip the control their adolescent Captain — a jumped up midshipman — but their supercargo, a magus called Doctor Isambard, extracts an exacting promise from them in exchange for his cooperation.

Five Twelfths of Heaven is an entertaining, brisk read which manages the tricky feat of combining magic with technology rather successfully. The system of starship navigation is particularly inventive, requiring the pilot to visualise a set of marks — a tree, a wheel, a dragon — in order to impose enough structure on the protean domain of purgatory to allow them steer a course to their destination. All of this is powered by elemental water, a keel treated with the Philosopher's Tincture, and a harmonium to shape the music of the spheres — all more alchemy than technology.

The setting is nicely drawn and feels surprisingly contemporary, partly because it uses its own system of technology and partly — and depressingly — because of the Hegemony's insistence that women are lower status than men. The lead characters are engaging, improve as they settle in to their roles and at some point their marriage shifts from being a convenience to being something more real. I felt that there were some moments were a bit more reflection might have been good — the very casual way they seem to acquire and lose starships makes you wonder if they're ten-a-penny — but that may just be me being uncharitable because lack of introspection is the price you pay for a pacy plot...