139 pages
Published 2017
Read from May 4 to May 5
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
For a long while, from childhood into my early twenties, space opera was my SFF subgenre of choice. I grew up on Star Trek: The Next Generation. The 1997 reissue of the Star Wars trilogy (my first time back in a movie theater since Short Circuit 2 disappointed me as a tiny child) led to an obsession. I filled up notebooks with plans for Star Wars novels before I turned to plotting more "serious" space opera set in a universe of my own design. Books like Hyperion and Dune were staples of my early adulthood. For that matter, the very first book I read and reviewed for this blog -- Memory by Linda Nagata -- could be considered space opera.
As I entered my thirties, our dimming prospects for an optimistic future -- and the grim realism that crept into sci-fi as a consequence -- helped turn me into a fantasy reader. The corporate vacuity of The Rise of Skywalker and The Book of Boba Fett chilled my lifelong love of Star Wars. I can't think of the last standalone space opera I read. Going through my reviews, it looks like the last short story was "Blue as Blood" by Leah Cypress (reviewed here in 2019), while the last novel was Jack Vance's The Star King (which I read in 2016).
It's, uh... it's been a while.
Water into Wine is a minimalist but moving tale of a gender-nonconforming person who inherits a vineyard on a distant planet and must figure out how to make a life there, while an interplanetary war sows chaos and death all around. A ground-level space opera of ordinary people trying to make do in the midst of armored patrolmen and dropships and space battles is something I never knew I needed in my life. I could read a dozen books with this basic setup before I tired of it -- not necessarily in this story's universe, which is barely sketched in, but certainly with this vibe of determination and loss.
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