Grand Central Arena

This is a fun exciting romp with aliens, scientific exploration, foundational theological questions and a few comic book heroes and villain types thrown in for good measure.In my opinion, SF + F space opera authors can be usefully understood by asking what they think most humans are like. (This is all overstated, of course, but I still find it useful when I'm trying to decide whether I want to read a particular author.)The range of beliefs divides like this:1. most humans tend to be fundamentally good, though some choose to be evil (some authors in this category add: but even for the evil people, redemption is always available) [e.g. Diane Duane, Mercedes Lackey, Marion Zimmer Bradley, David Freer, Ray Bradbury, Steve Miller/Sharon Lee]2. People tend to be fundamentally good though flawed, though some people choose to be really bad--often because they're self-absorbed. [David Weber, Louise McMasters Bujold, Wen Spencer, Ryk Spoor, MCA Hogarth, Robert Heinlein]3. People tend to be an admixture of good and bad, but the negative traits are easier to fall into. (some authors add: but with a lot of work, people can learn to be good; or if they're one of the born-good or made-good-through-trials, they can even become a kind of saint or demi-god.) [Orson Scott Card, Steven Donaldson, Andre Norton, Michael Scott Rohan, Elizabeth Moon, Carol Berg]4. Most people are bad, bent or morally lax, and anyone who thinks they can be good is deceived. (Joe Abercrombie)I don't like reading writers in category 4, as for me, that's too grim a space to inhabit. Writers in category 1 can often be fun reading, though their work is often dependably safe and that's less interesting. I find that category 2 and 3 writers often offer the most deeply touching stories, as for them, being a good person involves suffering. It requires hard work and choosing that path, often over and over again, during a person's life, and in consequence, the path can be deeply graced and powerful.Spoor lands in my category 2, as there are no bad people on board the spaceship Holy Grail, though everyone does have moments of weakness or self-doubt and they sometimes make bad decisions, often out of pride. The Arena is home to some thoroughly bad beings, however, who are trying to wipe out our hero/ines, so Spoor's story hews closer to the oldfashioned space opera trope of pure good vs. pure evil than would a category 3 story.What I especially liked about the story are the Ariane Austin and Marc Duquesne characters. They are both interesting and complex, though we learn more about Duquesne's backstory than about Austin's. They seem to be bound together by shared understanding, perhaps also experience, and in the joy of adrenaline.The story keeps going at a good clip, with lots of action and risk, but is balanced by nuanced character interactions and inquiry. Lots of aliens with many different personalities and viewpoints broaden the story give it more impact.I also liked the theological questions, and I think SFF is one of the best ways to look at theology, since there can be so many ways for creatures to relate to their creators and to seek meaning in their lives. So the questions: Who made the Arena? What was it meant to be? How and why were people being given extra powers when they were turned into Shadeweavers or Faith Initiates? What did those people being elevated really see during their rituals, and what did it mean about how the universe works? What about the Faith's prophecy and its meaning (if any) for humanity? are all intriguing and I hope Spoor continues the series past the second book so we can get more information to speculate with.

This book is dedicated to E.E. "Doc" Smith, generally considered the father of space opera, and you can easily see why. For starters, one of the main characters is named Marc C. DuQuesne... Not that he's actually the "Blackie" DuQuesne who was the main villain of the "Skylark" books - but he's the product of a misguided experiment in genetic modification that led to his early life being as a player in a giant RPG, acting the role of Blackie. A small crew (8 total) takes off in the spaceship Holy Grail to test the first human-made FTL drive, with daredevil space pilot Ariane Austin as pilot and ship com-mander; the rest of the crew are scientists or engineers of various sorts, including a medical doctor. And more or less as soon as the FTL drive is switched on, all the AIs that did most of the controlling of the ship's systems go dead, including the one that runs the fusion reactor that provides primary power. Fortunately, Ariane had insisted on a full set of manual controls for everything, as well as sensors that didn't go through the AIs, and she's able to prevent the ship from crashing into a wall in space and bring it to dock at a port of some sort within the spherical space enclosed by the wall. And after some experimentation and exploration, they find that they're in a sort of sub-universe where all the races that have developed FTL flight have their own spheres, and form factions of various sizes. And the first thing they have to do is to come up with enough credits to afford to get their ship's power banks recharged so they can get back to Earth. And some of the factions are pretty aggressive, so they have to meet a number of challenges first - including some literal ones where one of them has to meet a member of the opposing faction in a duel of some sort. The Arena is something of an answer to the Fermi Paradox - if FTL travel is possible, any race that achieved it could use self-replicating AIs to explore the whole universe within a matter of a few million years; if such a race is benign, why haven't we heard from them, and if it's not, how did we evolve? The answer in this book is that AIs don't work in the universe that turns out to be the only way to get FTL travel, so you don't get the multiplier effect Fermi assumed. Anyhow, I greatly enjoyed this book; Ariane and DuQuesne are the only really well-realized characters, but they're very good, the world-building is first-rate, and the action pretty much non-stop. Definitely recommended.

I really enjoyed this one. It had some cool Sci-fi, some interesting aliens, and a unique place to let them all interact. Well done.

The author is a big E.E. Doc Smith fan, and it shows in a lot of ways. There are similar themes but it's not a thinly disguised fanfic or rip off of his work.Humanity is peaceful, post-scarcity, about half-way to transcending and feeling a little cramped in just the one solar system. Our heroic band venture out on the first manned test flight of an FTL drive, but things do not go as expected ... Ahead of them lies challenges and wonder in a whole new universe with whole new rules.I suggest you give it a try rather than reading the more detailed summaries available online.

I really can't say it in any other way. Grand Central Arena is a Grand space opera in the Tradition of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, the influence of the "old masters" like Doc Smith is felt throughout the book, more or less right away at the first pages.To that, Ryk Spoor has added a modern touch with artificial intelligences, virtual reality, i.e. a human Society living in a golden age.The book is a real page turner and was a fun read.Can't recommend it enough. The plots seem byzantine quite often, the bad guys are interesting and multi-faceted, the politics nicely rendered.All in all, awesome journey.

One of those fantastical space operas that reaches beyond the heavens, engages the fantasy drive and enters the great beyond!All kinds of oddball sleight of hand science clash with unashamed hints of maybe magic maybe not magic in an enigmatic, awesome arena space that seen in the theatre of your mind, takes your breath away.Ryk clearly has had a fantastic time writing this, no two ways about it, it's brilliant fun, hard to put down and paced to make your heart race.All three novels are as good and you want to read them all!

It's intellectully and scientifically stretching for this non-scientist to follow at times but actually quite intriguing. Well worth reading.