Book completed
Long Boat Diplomacy, by Matthew Ambrose. This book continues the story he began in Long Boat Star Crossing, which I read a few months ago. These are self-published books; Matthew is a childhood friend of my friend BHW, and he'd asked her for feedback, then got some from me too. I volunteered to copy-edit his next book, and this was it. So it's not published yet, but will be fairly soon.
Matthew Ambrose is a very entertaining storyteller, with a real talent for making action scenes easy to visualize, even when they involve spaceships and other advanced technologies. He also writes appealing characters, both leaders and regular folk, and he's especially strong at showing people building community. The "long boat" of the title is an interstellar space ship, where people may live for decades, raising families, in between their stops.
One unusual feature of these books is something I consider a strength. Often science fiction writers assume that a thousand years from now, we'll have "outgrown" religion. As a research psychologist specializing in worldviews, I have to say that this premise seems highly implausible. It makes sense to me that many of the people on the "long boat" would be Christian, and it's delightful that the version they practice is generous and open-hearted, that is, more faithful to the teachings of Jesus than we often see in today's media. I'm hoping that additional spiritual practices will make an appearance in future books in the series. Meanwhile, if you're open to reading some entertaining and reasonably well-written Christian space opera, consider these books.