The Curve of the Corridor by Victoria Feistner

Reviewed by Robert Runté

You know how in those cooking contest shows there’s often a ‘reinvention’ challenge, where the cooks are asked to take an everyday comfort food and ‘elevate’ it? The Curve of the Corridor is that for Space Opera.

The story starts out with smugglers, a gang lord, and space pirates, but quickly moves onto a Mary Celeste situation: a giant generation-Ark floating abandoned in the middle of nowhere. As they delve into the mystery of what happened to the passengers and crew, things rapidly go downhill for our heroes. They are lost in space and time; chased by a shadowy government agency of espers; rescued—or is it captured—by slightly mad scientists; and there may be zombies.

If that sounds like a plot cobbled together from a half dozen bad sci-fi movies, I would remind you that a plot summary of Romeo and Juliet sounds bad too. The Curve of the Corridor is actually great, edge-of-seat reading. You quickly come to care about the characters, a group of strangers randomly thrown together. Their histories and arcs are all distinct and thoughtfully developed, their separate motivations are all reasonable within those contexts, so that the decisions they take make sense, even when the reader knows they are making things a hundred times worse. The mystery they are all caught up in is based on a clever premise, the stakes keep getting higher, and not all of them are going to get out alive. The deeper I got into the novel, the harder it was to put down.

Modern speculative fiction has largely moved away from space opera (although Hollywood is still fixated on the 1950s-60s SF with Star Trek and Star Wars and the like). If Feistner had published this back in the day, she would be counted among the genre’s founding grand masters because this is absolutely great science fiction.

A brief word about the publisher: I try to review the whole range of speculative fiction, across sub-genres and a sampling of the big five, small presses, and the self-published to present a representative sample of Canadian SF. Each time, I review the best thing across my desk that month. I try not to keep reviewing the same authors or the same publishers, but . . . month after month, Brain Lag keeps putting out the very best books. Publisher Catherine Fitzsimmons not only knows a good story when she sees it, she is obviously a first-rate editor because there is not a single word, phrase, scene, or idea I would change in any of the books from Brain Lag.

There are two other publishers putting out excellent Canadian speculative fiction I feel I can’t review because I am too closely connected. Jenne Greene’s Broken Realms for example, is an outstanding YA portal fantasy, but I was Shadowpaw Press’s editor for that one, so I am obviously too biased to review it here. Similarly, I love the stuff coming out of Donovan Street Press, but again, I’m on the Editorial Board so my reviewing them would not be appropriate . . . but check out Paul Burn’s new YA, The Druid and the Dragon, and preorder Joe Mahoney’s comedy adventure, Captains Away.

Back to The Curve of the Corridor: I unhesitatingly recommended this to any fan of SF for its thoughtful reinvention of space opera: familiar elements but in a fresh, more deeply credible combination, with better characterization and a more satisfying emotional payoff.