These are the sixth and seventh books in the authors’ Mageworlds
series, which I’ve been re-reading and reviewing over the last few months.

When The Stars Asunder was published in 1999, Jane and I were
excited; I’d read the previous books aloud to her to our mutual enjoyment,
and this one looked to be a doozy. Set in the far distant past, long
before the first Mage War, it promised to tell us of the first contact
between the Mage Worlds and the rest of the civilized galaxy, and also to
tell the story of Beka Rosselin-Metadi’s enigmatic helper, the
“Professor”. We snapped it up the moment it came out, in hardcover no
less, and I started reading it to Jane on the way home.

And, alas, we were greatly disappointed. I never finished reading it
aloud; instead, we each finished it separately. And unlike the others in
the series, it sat on the shelf, unread, until just recently when I
picked it up prior to reading its successor, A Working of Stars.
(It’s some measure of my disappointment that the latter book was published
in 2002, and I only just got around to it.)

Anyway, I approached The Stars Asunder with considerable
curiousity. Was it as bad as I remembered? Had I read it fairly the
first time? And I suppose the most honest answer is that it’s better, and
just as bad.

First, it’s a different sort of book than the others in the series; it’s
slower paced, and there are fewer action sequences. Jane and I had the
wrong expectations going into it, and so it’s not entirely surprising
that it didn’t work for us. And, I was surprised to note that some of the
amazingly stupid and awful scenes that I remember being so annoyed by
aren’t actually in the book at all. Apparently I dreamed them.

On the other hand, there are bad bits as well. There’s a whole espionage
and intrigue subplot that simply doesn’t work: it’s confusing, it slows
down the main story, and although motivations of the characters involved
seemed clear enough at the beginning I found them entirely mystifying by
the end. The ending is abrupt and unsatisfying, and leaves lots of
loose-ends floating about–and there’s no indication that a sequel might
be forthcoming. And then there’s the centerpiece of the book, the first
contact between a Mage ship and a freighter from the Civilized Worlds,
which I still can’t bring myself to believe in. Though, to be fair the scene’s
not quite as absurd as I thought it the first time I read it.

A Working of Stars is much more satisfying. It follows
perhaps ten years after the finish of The Stars Asunder, and
ties up a fair number of that book’s loose ends (though by no means
all of them), and it’s got a lot more of that Space Opera Goodness we
were looking for. My major complaint about it is that it seems to
contradict things were were told in the second book of the series,
Starpilot’s Grave, though possibly there are reasons for that.

There’s clearly room for yet another book in this part of the series, and
I rather wish Doyle and MacDonald would get on with it.