Do you remember how you felt the first time that you dived into a book and didn’t want to come up for air? When you first discovered how exhilarating reading could be? When you surrendered yourself to the story, pushing reality aside so you could live inside an exciting fictional world and cheer on people you really, really wanted to succeed against the odds?

I do.

And I’ve been missing it.

I read 150 books a year, and they give me a lot of pleasure, but finding a book that intoxicates my imagination and revives the passionate pleasure in reading that I had when I was young is rare. Finding seven novels about the same characters that can sustain that intense enjoyment is stunning and wonderful. Elizabeth Moon’s series, ‘Vatta’s War’ and ‘Vatta’s Peace’ did that for me.y

Eight weeks ago, I stumbled upon ‘Trading In Danger’⁠ (2003), the first book in Elizabeth Moon’s ‘Vatta’s War’ series. I hadn’t meant to read ‘Trading In Danger’. I was just going to read the Kindle sample so I could decide whether I wanted to buy it. It got its hooks into me at once, and not only did I read the whole thing, but I bought the rest of the five-book series.

I gulped down ‘Trading in Danger’ in a day. Here’s an extract from my review⁠:

IN A NUTSHELL
A fun, overcoming-the-odds adventure that twists the Military Sci Fi trope in interesting ways, has an engaging young woman as the lead character, is fast-paced, exciting, and has skilful world-building and reasonably well-rounded characters. It kept me turning the pages and left me eager for more. 

“This is the kind of exhilarating but thought-provoking Space Opera that I love. I loved that it twisted the Military SF tropes by having our rising-star space cadet dismissed from the academy in the opening scenes. This isn’t what is supposed to happen to a competent, talented, dedicated heroine, especially when her name is Vatta, and the series is called Vatta’s War. 

Then it turned out that Ky Vatta is an heiress to a major space shipping company, and she’s been given the captaincy of a ship with instructions to take it on a last milk run before having it scrapped. That didn’t sound very exciting, so I was already waiting for Ky to do something different and for things to go wrong. She did, and they did, and suddenly I was in an exciting struggle with an inexperienced captain and a civilian crew, finding themselves in a war zone. There was sabotage, explosions, mercenaries, rogue ships, mutinies and no means of communicating with home.”

Although the five books in the Vatta’s War series were published at the rate of about one a year between 2003 and 2008, they form a single continuous story arc. I was very glad that I didn’t have to wait twelve months until I could find out what happened in the next book. It was a struggle for me to ration myself to one book a week.

As I’d expect with a military Sc Fi series, the Vatta’s War books were packed with action ranging from skirmishes in the street to full-scale battles in space. Elizabeth Moon did a great job on the world-building. The space stations, ships and weapons were all felt real, as did the behaviour of the various military officers involved. Each novel was exciting and had a specific set of challenges. Every challenge overcome led towards the final confrontation between Ky and her enemies.

I enjoyed following Ky Vatta’s progress from being kicked out of Space Force Academy just before graduation to founding and leading a multi-system Space Defence Force, but what made the series so binge-worthy was that the books weren’t just about her, or even just about military engagements. They were much more complicated than that. 

The books followed the progress of multiple characters, most of whom were neither white nor male. Most of the action in the book was driven by women either in the military,or serving as mercenaries or as civilians driving interplanetary trade. 

The focus was mainly on three Vatta women, Ky, her cousin Stella and their great-aunt Grace. What I liked most was that none of them was perfect, nor did they always get on with one another or even define their goals in priorities in the same way. Each of them had been pigeonholed by their family: Ky as the dutiful rule-following, Stella the beautiful but flighty one and Grace as the slightly batty but harmless old lady. All of them developed, over the course of the series,xx into personas that blasted the pigeonholes apart. All three women were formidable in their own way. All of them were capable of killing when the occasion called for it. All of them believed in their own abilities. 

I liked that the books covered everything from petty rivalries, through political intrigues, to full-scale megalomanic villainry. The problems couldn’t be defined or resolved purely in military terms. 

I got to the end of the Vatta’s War series feeling like I’d visited somewhere real and been given people to cheer for. It did leave me wondering what would happen once the war was over and normal political and commercial interests started to drive the agendas. 

It seems that Elizabeth Moon wondered the same thing. Nine years after she published the final Vatta’s War book, she returned to the same cast of characters with the Vatta’s Peace series. 

I loved that, while these books were as immediately immersive and exciting as their predecessors, they broke new ground. The action was all set on Ky’s home world of Slotter’s Key. If all had gone as it should, Ky would have been returning home to be welcomed as a hero, release her assets in the Vatta business and go back to running the Space Defence Force. So, of course, nothing went as it was supposed to and soon Ky, Stella and Grace are all under attack in one way or another. I liked that Ky, Stella and Grace all continued to develop through these two books, The first book was a great survival story that also uncovered a secret that drove the second book. Both books were tense, fast-paced and enormous fun.