SCG

In the first chapter of her book Eddo-Lodge recounts a story from 1919, seven months after the end of the First World War. In Liverpool, where post-war employment opportunities were scarce, a hundred black factory workers lost their jobs without warning. White workers refused to work with them. The same month “a Caribbean man was stabbed in the face by two white men after an argument over a cigarette”. Street fights and police raids of black homes followed, culminating in the tragic death of a twenty-four-year-old seaman called Charles Wootton. A white mob threw him into the water and, as he attempted to swim to safety, he was pelted by bricks until he sank. In the following days, white mobs marched the streets of Liverpool. 

Later in that same chapter we read of Guy Bailey, a nineteen-year-old Jamaican man. In 1963 a local youth worker arranged a job interview for him with the Bristol bus service, having first confirmed that jobs were available and that Bailey possessed the necessary qualifications. On arrival, as Bailey recounted in a BBC interview almost fifty years later, he heard the Bristol Omnibus Company’s receptionist tell the manager “your two o’clock appointment is here. But he’s black.” The manager’s response was “Tell him we have no vacancies here.” 

In ‘Embers of War’, predecessor to ‘Fleet of Knives’, we were introduced to the decommissioned intelligent warship Trouble Dog, which in a former life had been complicit in the destruction of the sentient jungle-world of Pelapatarn. This orbital strike ended the Conglomeration-Outwarder war, perhaps preventing hundreds of thousands of human deaths at the cost of a genocide of planetary proportions. Following this, Trouble Dog renounced its former ties to the Conglomeration navy and joined the House of Reclamation, an organisation devoting its considerable resources to rescue operations throughout human-colonised space. In its journey toward redemption Trouble Dog is joined by Captain Sal Konstanz, a member of the defeated Outwarders who helped rescue some of the few human survivors from Pelapatarn. 

The shadow of Pelapatarn hung heavily over ‘Embers of War’, a space opera expressly concerned with redemption. Trouble Dog muses on its role at Pelapatarn, a time before it imagines it possessed a conscience; about what it is to grieve; about how it is still at heart a warship and what that truth speaks to; and whether its self-reinvention as an instrument to save lives can ever be enough. The Dog’s counterpart in that novel is Ona Sudak, a poet who – it is later revealed – is better known to humanity as Annelida Deal, the Conglomeration officer who ordered the attack on Pelapatarn. Sudak too grapples with her conscience, but for her the question differs. Was what she ordered justified? Were the Conglomeration lives she saved worth the price that Pelapatarn paid?