BOOK REVIEW: Velocity Weapon (The Protectorate, #1) by Megan O'Keefe

Velocity Weapon is the first book in a new space opera trilogy called the Protectorate written by Megan E. O'Keefe. Since space opera is my all-time favorite I had placed this book on my TBR (to be read) list a while ago and recently moved it to the top and I'm very pleased that I did.

The story in Velocity Weapon is told in multiple timelines and in multiple locations simultaneously. The primary plot follows Sanda Greeve, who wakes up in a life preservation module apparently 200 years after her last memory which was of the beginning of a war between two human societies that have colonized the planets Ada Prime and Icarion. Sanda awakes naked and missing part of a leg on a sentient Icarion warship  called The Light of Berossus capable of accelerating up to 8% of the speed of light and interstellar travel. The second timeline takes place 2 years after the start of the Prime-Icarion war and features Biran Greeve, Sanda's younger brother, who is also Speaker of the Keepers of Ada Prime. Keepers are people who are selected to serve as the keepers of the secret of Ada Prime's greatest technological achievement: the construction of Casimir gates which allow instantaneous interstellar hyperspatial travel. The third timeline takes places some 3500+ years before the first two, depicting the dawn of the Prime area, in which Alexandra Halston, the billionaire CEO of a globe-spanning corporation called Prime who created the very first Casimir gate (after discovering a curious artifact possibly of alien origin) and is credited with humanity's colonization of interstellar space.

The main characters in the book are the artificial intelligence running the warship The Light of Berossus (who likes to be called Bero), Sanda, and Biran. There are multiple other important characters as well: Tomas Cepko, a spy who is hired by Biran (at the usurious price of 90% of all his future earnings!) to try and find Sanda and rescue her; Jules, a small-time criminal who comes across a mysterious cache of military-grade tech that puts everyone she knows in danger while simultaneously providing her with possibly super-human powers of recovery and reflexes and whose connections to the other main plots are mysterious and unclear; Sanda and Biran's two dads Graham and Ilan.

One of the very appealing aspects of Velocity Weapon to me is the author's clear and consistent approach to (re)presenting a diverse and inclusive cast of characters in this space opera. Sanda and Biran are two straight characters who have been raised by a gay male couple that they love very much. One of Jules' main contact is a non-binary character named Arden who is described by all the other characters using the pronouns they and them. The description of most of the characters makes it VERY clear that they are not white (there's an explicit back-story exposition that most of the people in both Ada Prime and Icarion can trace their heritage back to the country of Ecuador on Earth). If that wasn't enough, there are multiple examples of descriptions of the skin tones of characters which are compared to various shades of brown (e.g. coffee with milk, coffee without milk, etc) and most people's hair is dark and curly.

Overall, I was very impressed with Velocity Weapon. As the blurb says, it is an "epic of intergalactic politics, war and rogue A.I." This is right up my alley, and I am confident that readers who like the work of Peter F. Hamilton, Alastair Reynolds and James S.A. Corey will enjoy this first book in The Protectorate as much as I did. I am eagerly awaiting the following books in this series!

Title: Velocity Weapon.
Author: Megan E. O'Keefe.
Paperback: 544 pages.
Publisher: Orbit.
Date Published: June 11, 2019.
Date Read: November 4, 2019.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★★  (5.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A (4.0/4.0).

PLOT: A.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A+.
WRITING: A.