#320/A – Space Academy Series by C.T. Phipps and Michael Suttkus

Storytelling is like cooking. Unlike baking (and especially pastry), cooking is very forgiving if you deviate from the recipe. The key is understanding proportion. Too much of one ingredient can overpower another, and a writer who believes that one ingredient is more important will find the ignored ingredients suffer as a result.

This is my way of saying there is nothing wrong with having a story that is both a good comedy and a good science fiction story at the same time. The trick is not writing a comedy that happens to have SF in it, or an SF story that happens to have some chuckles.

Enter the Space Academy series, by C.T. Phipps and Michael Suttkus. I reviewed another of Phipps’ books last year, The Rules of Supervillany (issue #314), and it’s fair to say that what he did for subverting the superhero genre he and Suttkus do for space opera.

The series is a love letter to things like Star Trek or Mass Effect, while pointing out the fallacies of those settings in a way that improves the world building rather than tear it down. The reader will be introduced to the surface veneer of certain tropes, then get exposed to the realities that make that trope possible. Sometimes those realities are simply logical. Sometimes they are dark and unpleasant.

Though the focus is always on the characters, these are the kind of epic space operas where whole star systems, and even civilizations, hang in the balance.

In Space Academy Dropouts, we’re introduced to this concept quickly, as our hero, Vance Turbo (originally Vannevar James Tagawa) tries to drop out of the Space Academy of a Federation-like interstellar community, only to be forcefully recruited by their Black Ops division on a secret mission.

Vance is inexplicably made first officer, which he feels completely unqualified for. Then he ends up taking command, which he feels even less qualified for. His ex-girlfriend is on the crew and can read his mind, the ship AI has a thing for him, and the rest of the crew are made up of dropouts and rejects who have no real reason to respect him.

What makes Vance work as the POV protagonist is that he is both optimistic and cynical at the same time. We see him dissect assumptions about how the universe works, and recognizes self-serving motives and political expediency for what they are. Yet he does not use this as an excuse to behave the same way. He has a strong sense of morality, and it’s that morality that ultimately has him “fail upward” to save the day.

Then, in Space Academy Rejects, something very interesting happens… we do not continue right where we left off. In fact, six years have passed.

After the events of the previous book (most of which became public knowledge) one would expect that Vance would continue on as “the youngest captain ever” in the classic James T Kirk sense. Nope.

Instead, he rejoins Space Fleet and works his way up the ladder normally… well, as normal as one can when you were raised by a famous space hero and your earlier exploits were made into a movie.

But things don’t get any easier for him, as an imminent and unstoppable disaster has Vance limping his ship back home and being reassigned as the captain of another ship. And the woman who should have got the job (who Vance has feelings for) got stuck as his first officer. Awkward.

But that’s the least of his problems. Space Fleet has had to lower its admission standards. And most of those who couldn’t make the cut elsewhere were stuck on this ship. That’s because Vance’s ship was intended as a PR platform on a goodwill tour, to the point where it has been fitted with a shopping district.

So, when they end up in a life-or-death situation with an evil Empire of fascist space squirrels, everyone finds themselves in way over their heads.

The authors do a great job of keeping things funny, but not at the expense of the worldbuilding or internal logic. If you’re a fan of Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat novels, or Robert Asprin’s Phule’s Company, you’ll definitely enjoy this series.