Title:
Once a Hero
Author:
Elizabeth Moon
Publisher:
Baen Books, 1997
ISBN
0-671-87769-0

The time that strong and active female main characters are the exception rather than the rule in popular fiction is clearly over. The fact that women can be heroic, and not just damsels in distress no longer seems remarkable. To that extent, then, Once a Hero is a thoroughly unremarkable book. However, to the extent that Elizabeth Moon has written a military adventure story that I enjoyed reading, this book is a bit unusual.

I'm sure many regular readers of science fiction have noticed them, the books with dangerous looking young men and women on the covers, holding gigantic weapons in armored hands. They belong to a sub genre of science fiction that celebrates our ability to make war, and tries for voyeuristic glimpses of a future as miserable as our present. Where cyberpunk tries to make a future of slums ruled by wealthy technocrats seem interesting, if not outright attractive, these turbo charged soldiers ask us to enjoy the notion of neverending war.

Anne McCaffrey, S.M. Sirling, Jerry Pournelle, Timothy Zahn, and Elizabeth Moon, among others, have written shelves of books describing futuristic mayhem. BattletechTM and Star WarsTM books' main selling points are high power weaponry and pitched battles. Of course, the action always favors the good guys. Even if they get beat up a bit, there are amazing medical advances so that the hero is ready again with a full complement of limbs by the time the next book comes out. There are aristocratic titles thrown in for glamor and intrigue. Bad guys are foolish and backwards, and often the hero wins because of some version of the David versus Goliath story.

I think there are too many authors reveling in blazing turbo lasers and whining servos of power armor. The moral considerations of a militarized society aside, I find it hard to believe that a species willing to squander that many resources on armed conflict would ever make it to the stars, or if they did, manage to stay there.

But Moon's story somehow manages to avoid the overwrought machismo of the worst of militaristic SF by spending quality time on the characters and their relationships. I can ignore many flaws when at least some part of the story is written with this much skill.

The story is set in a highly militarized future, where humans have colonized many worlds in many solar systems. There are many alliances among the worlds, with different kinds of governments. Esmay Suiza belongs to a group of allied worlds which maintains some kind of aristocracy. Suiza is the daughter of one of the more insignificant aristocrats.

Esmay Suiza has just returned from an expedition that went terribly wrong in most ways, and which Suiza barely managed to save. However, the taint of mutiny is attached to Suiza's success. With this taint, she is thrust into a new situation where her notoriety is more of a handicap than an aid, but her strength sees her through in the end.

Elizabeth Moon has created a heroine in the best tradition of the action adventure. I've seen this kind of thing come off horribly hamhanded, but Moon manages to endow her heroine with a kind of grace and a self effacing competence that endears her to her companions, and to the reader.