130. (February 2024) Sun of Suns, book 1 in the Virga series, by Karl Schroeder — The Tabletop Roleplayers' Book Club

Sun of Suns 1) The Story

RichardAbbott — Sat, 02 Mar 2024 19:10:09 +0000

Did you enjoy the story? It is pretty much self-contained with decent closure, but also clearly has unfinished threads. Are you inclined to pick up any more books in the series to find out what happens next?

Sun of Suns 3) The Setting

RichardAbbott — Sat, 02 Mar 2024 19:12:23 +0000

Virga is a manufactured environment - did you find it intriguing? Feasible? Did the idea of a zero-gee world where gravity can only be generated by rotation make sense? What about the secondary aspects like localised suns, globules of water, sargassos etc? What about human adaptation to zero-gee?

Sun of Suns 4) An Artificial World

RichardAbbott — Sat, 02 Mar 2024 19:13:30 +0000

For most of the book Virga strikes us as artificially constructed. But from Aubri's point of view it is one of the few (maybe the only) place where "natural" rules of physics apply, while outside, the universe seems more like a VR environment (so far as we can tell from odd hints). Did you like this inversion of perspective or not? Did you want to know more about Aubri's world (for which you'd probably have to read other books in the series)?

Sun of Suns 6) Gaming

RichardAbbott — Sat, 02 Mar 2024 19:15:02 +0000

Would Virga make a good game setting? How would you acclimatise players to the various constraints and opportunities? If you were running the game would you favour a personal, political or military storyline?

Sun of Suns 5) Analogies

RichardAbbott — Sat, 02 Mar 2024 19:14:18 +0000

Most stories work by letting the reader draw analogies between parts of the story and aspects of the real world. Were there any such here that you spotted?

Sun of Suns 2) The Characters

RichardAbbott — Sat, 02 Mar 2024 19:10:58 +0000

Most of the main characters have ambivalent motives and partially-hidden back-stories. Did that work for you? Which (if any) of the characters did you find most interesting?

About Karl Schroeder

RichardAbbott — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 11:27:24 +0000

I was born September 4, 1962 in Brandon Manitoba. My family are Mennonites, part of a community which has lived in southern Manitoba for over one hundred years. I am the second science fiction writer to come out of this small community -- the first was A.E. van Vogt!

I moved to Toronto in 1986 to pursue my writing career. I married Janice Beitel in April 2001 and our daughter Paige was born in May 2003.

I divide my time between writing fiction and consulting--chiefly in the area of Foresight Studies and technology.

Cover blurb for Sun of Suns

RichardAbbott — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 11:25:04 +0000

In Karl Schroeder's sci-fi thriller, Hayden Griffin has come to the city of Rush with one thing in mind: to take murderous revenge for his parents' deaths.

It is the distant future. The world known as Virga is a fullerene balloon three thousand kilometers in diameter, filled with air, water, and aimlessly floating chunks of rock. The humans who live in this vast environment must build their own fusion suns and "towns" that are in the shape of enormous wood and rope wheels that are spun for gravity.

Young, fit, bitter, and friendless, Hayden Griffin is a very dangerous man. He's come to the city of Rush in the nation of Slipstream with one thing in mind: to take murderous revenge for the deaths of his parents six years ago. His target is Admiral Chaison Fanning, head of the fleet of Slipstream, which conquered Hayden's nation of Aerie years ago. And the fact that Hayden's spent his adolescence living with pirates doesn't bode well for Fanning's chances . . .

Cover blurb for Cities of the Air
It is the distant future. The world known as Virga is a fullerene balloon three thousand kilometers in diameter, filled with air, water, and floating chunks of rock. The humans who live in this vast environment must build their own fusion suns and "towns" —enormous wood and rope wheels that are spun for centripetal gravity.

This complex and fascinating world is the setting for the novels of Virga, Karl Schroeder's interstellar far-future space habitat sealed off from contamination by the rest of the inhabited universe. These books have set a high standard for hard SF adventure in the last decade, and now the first two novels, Sun of Suns and Queen of Candesce, are brought out for the first time in one trade paper omnibus.