Book #3 of 2024:
Orion and King Arthur by Ben Bova (Orion #6)
This is a pretty good rendition of the classic Arthurian legend, especially in its emotional build-up to the king’s fated tragic end. (I like the initial wrinkle of him meeting Beowulf in his younger days, too.) It’s a little stranger as an Orion story, though, even setting aside the 2011 novel’s status as the de facto conclusion to that loose sci-fi saga in the wake of author Ben Bova’s death a few years ago.
Our reincarnated / time-traveling super-soldier is in his usual position of remembering bits of his past lives and future earth history, including some of Arthur’s coming exploits, and he’s set his will against the all-powerful Creators who want the young ruler destroyed. But he’s operating outside of a specific mission here, protecting his liege lord for seemingly no other reason than that he’s taken a liking to the guy, and neither the character nor the wider text offers any rebuttal to his opponents’ claims that King Arthur’s continued survival will disrupt the space-time continuum. There’s also an odd lack of engagement with the issue that in reality, everything concerning the knights of the Round Table is more myth than history. Whereas in his previous adventures, the protagonist could at least be implicitly on the side of keeping the timeline aligned to established events, he’s now fighting for a fiction that no one ever acknowledges. It’s quite a turnaround for the writer who once included a lengthy afterword to Vengeance of Orion justifying the historical plausibility of his version of the Trojan War.
Overall, that’s perhaps a minor flaw. The larger matter holding me back from loving this title is the repetitive nature of its prose. It’s not just that every plot problem / step on Arthur’s path seems to be resolved by Orion as his squire planting a suggestion in the right ear, or that the combat sequences tend to fall into the same predictable action beats again and again. We also get frequent rehashed summaries of recent developments or explanations of returning characters, as though we hadn’t just read about them a chapter ago. It feels almost like a serialized broadcast, providing regular reminders to people who have been away from the work for a while or might have missed an installment, but I can find no evidence that the novel was actually written or originally published that way. It’s a very strange writing choice that interrupts the narrative flow every time.
The book represents a functional finale for Orion and his star-crossed goddess lover — here cast as the mystical Lady of the Lake — though it’s not clear whether Bova intended it to be one, and the story itself appears to suggest a route for eventual further sequels. But this is as fine a place as any for us to stop following the demigod’s winding journey across the eons.
[Content warning for incest, rape, and gore.]
This volume: ★★★☆☆
Overall series: ★★★☆☆
Volumes ranked: 1 > 5 > 6 > 2 > 4 > 3
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