Millennia from now, humanity will have travelled so far from Earth that the planet's location, even its appearance, will be little more than a memory. Humanity will have explored the Milky Way galaxy, finding on its millions of habitable planets little by way of intelligent life. It will consider itself supreme. But eventually, so much time will have past that some of these human cultures will have spun off from the main body of humanity, creating their own civilizations, their own histories. Attempts will be made to re-knit the fabric of humanity, but those efforts will fail, allowing these limbs of humanity to drift off, set upon their own paths, their own futures. Eventually, they will even forget their origins, truths gilded and enshrouded by legend and myth.
Now, more than 5,000 years have past since the exodus from Earth. But though this should have provided ample time for the various arms of humanity to evolve and develop technological wonders that would obviate any need for sweat and strife, this is very much not so for one of its lost limbs. In this region of space, humanity has long since descended into imperialism and war, as a retrograde empire ruthlessly tries to maintain its grip over its far-flung holdings while keeping its greedy gaze fixed on the Nine Planets alliance, a loose affiliation of worlds who have so far resisted the Empire's attempts at conquest. Such has been the Empire's thirst for war that history and the more peaceful sciences have been neglected, abandoned so that adolescents might play with the weapons of the gods. This has resulted in a society whose overall knowledge is rapidly regressing, a society held up only by the needs of the moment.
In Diving Into The Wreck, the series' first instalment, we are introduced to Boss, the eccentric captain of Nobody's Business, a mid-sized spaceship customized for salvage and exploration. Boss, something of an expert in archaeological digs in space, has, for years now, hired out her talents to tourist groups interested in the ruins of spacecraft which, with the passage of time, have lapsed into legend. It's by no means a perfect life, but considering that she's lucky to even be alive, Boss isn't complaining. After all, the childhood experiment that not only claimed the life of her mother, but lead to her father abandoning her, could have easily claimed her life as well. But it didn't and now, regardless of the nightmares, Boss is determined to be her own woman.
However, when she discovers the wreck of a lifetime, everything changes. All her plans for her future, along with the walls she's put up between herself and her past, are threatened when she verifies that, yes, she has just stumbled across the ruins of a Dignity Vessel, rumored to have been part of an old Earth fleet that's now thousands of years dead. Purported to have lacked faster-than-light travel, the vessel should not be anywhere near this region of space. And yet, there it is, the archaeological dive of a lifetime. Boss must know its secrets, even if they bring her uncomfortably close to deeply disturbing truths about her own past.
In City of Ruins, the second volume in The Diving Universe, boss finds herself the reluctant but determined spearhead of two distinct missions, the most vital of which is to preserve the independence of the Nine Planets alliance. For the Empire, she's learned, is attempting to recreate lost technologies found in the wreck she discovered in Diving Into The Wreck, technologies that will certainly grant them the power to overwhelm the worlds that have so far managed to maintain their independence from the Empire. Feeling responsible for these technologies falling into imperial hands, Boss begins a crusade to re-balance power throughout the region, little knowing that it will put her in direct opposition to the father who abandoned her.
Her second mission, however, comes upon Boss rather shockingly when she unexpectedly comes face-to-face with humanity's past. For an accident has brought into her time a living, breathing dignity Vessel complete with a bewildered crew of humans who have travelled 5,000 years in an instant. As the men and women on the ship try to adjust to this crushing revelation, boss attempts to establish first-contact with these legends. Though her efforts are thwarted by cultural and linguistic barriers that have calcified into thick walls in the five millennia separating their times, they manage to establish a connection just in time to realize that the Empire is keenly interested in Boss' activities and the awesome discovery she has unearthed.
In Boneyard, the most recent effort in the series, boss and the captain of the dignity Vessel try to integrate their teams under a single corporate umbrella which will continue the search for lost technologies, for the discovery of the lost dignity Vessel has prompted Boss to realize that her civilization is actually behind the one that existed 5,000 years ago. But while she and captain Cooper continue to seek outt the fate of the fleet that his ship once called home, a member of Boss' team has been captured deep in imperial space. Knowing that the Empire will stop at nothing to pry the secrets of Boss' mission from her friend, boss must try to rescue her, but at what cost?
Energized by its unusual approach to science fiction, The diving Universe is, in turns, entertaining and infuriating. Ms. Rusch, an author of works that range from Star Wars to Fey, writes in clear, unchallenging prose that invites a wide audience to enter into her unusual universe. For where other series concentrate on wars and aliens, weapons and conspiracies, Ms. Rusch devotes herself to a much more quiet and methodical world, one in which reason and patience rescue her characters from peril far more often than heroism does. Her emphasis on archaeology is a bold choice. For it asks the reader to re-imagine the field from the perspective of an outsider. Our digs try to rediscover our own past, but what would it be like to have someone else try to rediscover ours? What if we were nothing more than dusty bones buried under centuries of collapsed infrastructure? This, combined with a vivid expression of her passion for diving, lends Ms. Rusch's work a charmingly rustic feel for a series set in space.
However, as much as its conception is inventive and its setting is imaginative, the series' characters and their circumstances are, at times, disastrous. As much as I am inclined to grant the author the benefit of the doubt -- perhaps her actors are simply acting in accordance with the customs of their future society --, they can be incredibly pedantic. Identical arguments are not only held more than once in the same novel, similar disputes are repeated across the entire series, causing the unified whole to feel as though it's running in place. Worse, Ms. Rusch spends virtually no time developing this supposedly villainous empire. Readers are left completely uninformed about its structures, its customs, even its rulers. Its only representatives are individuals who already have tangled and thorny histories with the story's characters which makes it impossible to distinguish the Empire's villainy from the ill-feeling created by personal disputes. It seems clear that Ms. Rusch wants her readers to take the Empire's authoritarianism on faith, to view it through the same biased lens that Boss does, but this prevents us from building up our own trepidation of the Empire. Instead, we must adopt Boss' view which hardly argues for anxiety and urgency. What's the point of having an enemy in a story if we do not fear it?
The Diving Universe is empowered by interesting ideas and intriguing approaches, but it is unfortunately marred by a narrowness of execution that left me wanting much more background and much more urgency. Entertaining, but deeply flawed. (2/5 Stars)
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