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The Ethos Effect by L.E. Modesitt Jr.
01/02/2005 . Source: Andy Stout 
pub: Orbit. 579 page paperback. Price: £ 7.99 (UK). ISBN: 1-84149-322-8. Buy from Amazon US - Buy from Amazon UK
nb: US titles may only be available from Amazon US, and UK titles from Amazon UK. check out website: www.orbitbooks.co.uk
Given the commonalties between the two genres, at least in bookshop displays, it's always surprising that more authors don't cross over the porous borders between fantasy and SF more often. L.E. Modesitt Jr is one of the few that has at least a couple of times in his career. Known primarily for his mammoth 'Saga Of Recluce' fantasy series, his latest doesn't just stray into SF territory, it starts off there with a tightly-scripted space battle and stays there as interstellar empires and ideologies expand and clash hard against each other.
It sounds like vintage space opera, however, it's anything but. What Modesitt has done has taken the sort of plot that would have a Peter F. Hamilton or a David Webber movie into full-on battle and carnage meltdown mode and tuned all that widescreen action sequence material out. Instead he's used it as background, against which he sets a contemplative tale of a single individual's struggles with ethics, morality and coming to terms with a very imperfect universe.
The individual in question is a fully paid up member of the Taran Republic Space Force's awkward squad, Commander Van Albert. Albert, first of all, finds himself unwittingly and unknowingly at the centre of events of galactic importance, then gradually realises that he has become a fulcrum around which those events can turn. Along the way, he moves from being Commander of the RSFS Fergus to military liaison officer at the Taran embassy on Scandya to unemployed to working for the mysterious Integrated Information Systems foundation. Through these jobs, Modesitt introduces the reader to some of the issues facing this particular incarnation of interstellar humanity, namely political brinkmanship, duplicity, intolerance, religious fundamentalism, racism and homophobia.
The last two seem particularly shocking. Much far-future SF across the political spectrum assumes that such attitudes have simply died out. So, to come across people that pilot interstellar spaceships saying that their skin is too dark to fit into a society just seems fundamentally wrong. It's a card that Modesitt wisely never overplays, but it's always lurking at the back of matters, giving a solid spine to the threats that Albert faces.
It also makes it tempting to read the book as a metaphor for aspects of current human geopolitics. Given some of the events that occur towards the end of 'The Ethos Effect', however, you can only hope that that's not what Modesitt had in mind. Few authors could have come to conclusions quite so bleak if that was the case.
Though it takes place two centuries after Modesitt's 'The Parafaith War', 'The Ethos Effect' is a standalone novel and doesn't require any previous experience of the author's SF universe. What it does require is patience and a little deliberation. It's a slow and thoughtful book, with a level of detail and degree of texturing to some of the scenes that verges on the banal. With its examination of ethics though and thoroughly convincing creation of a squabbling future space-faring humanity, it's a highly rewarding book, too. And for what it's worth, you will probably be mulling over the ending for some time after reading.
Andy Stout
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