Seasons of Plenty (Tabitha Jute, #2)

ISTR this one had 'second album' or 'middle volume in a trilogy' syndrome. So not much happens. Living like beetles in a rock. (what was the Beatles' second album? It was "With the Beatles," not "The Beatles' Second Album" which was a US release only and later.)

Colin Greenland’s Take Back Plenty astonished a lot of people with its vivacious reappraisal of the Space Opera genre, featuring a devil-may-care heroine in the memorable Tabitha Jute, barge-owner and inadvertent saver of humanity from alien takeover. In the end she took back Plenty, the vast possibly sentient alien spaceship built by the Frasque, that supposedly long-extinct race rumours of whose survival occasionally shook the fragile world of human space.

Now Tabitha’s taken back Plenty, she ‘s going to fly it to the stars. In one of the strangest interstellar expeditions yet told, she - still Captain, but no longer of a Bergen Kobold barge, but of a huge world-ship - heads off into the haunted void of hyperspace, not in search of anything so much as just keeping going.

You remember the barge was called the "Alice Liddell"? Fine. If Take Back Plenty wasn’t particularly Wonderland-like, this chapter of Tabitha’s adventures is. In the same way that Lewis Carroll’s supposedly nonsense works were full of weird but in some way symbolically charged figures, so the world that Tabitha took over and peopled with people (some human, some not, like the lion-like Thrants) she hoped she could live with, is manically charged in a way that can not just be random, not at all. Tabitha, though, is almost losing it. She has been used to being her own woman, plying the spaceways when someone needed a cargo shifted; now the future of a whole world, much of it still unexplored, really relies on her.

Captaincy in hyperspace seems easy; Tabitha just tells the ship’s persona (transplanted from the "Alice Liddell") to keep going, and distracts herself with handsome young men and plenty of beer. For some reason that will become clear when Plenty takes itself online and hopefully becomes sentient, there is a renaming committee that is taking literally the idea that Plenty looks like a brain (and not an orbiting giant sprout, please) and giving bits of it names by analogy. The Frasque, according to the persona, had no names for any part of the vessel. So the names change; the Crap Chute, however, carries right on being the Crap Chute as far as most people are concerned. And how do you rename anywhere in a nearly-functioning anarchy like Plenty, where groups of formidable women that could have stepped straight out of Middle England, complete with afternoon tea and lace curtains, carry out strange expeditions? Fortunately the balance is kept intact by a vast crew of grungy good-for-nothings, but there is dissent in the ranks, and characters you thought were good turn out to be less so; the Hell’s Angels are allright but the pirates less so. Then again, there were the Perks; nasty little critters like intelligent dogs walking upright.

Tabitha herself is followed around by various groups of wannabees, and becomes the main character of a staged drama in which her part is taken by an overendowed blonde: a poke at the cover of the US edition, which showed Tabitha as similar, when it is made quite clear in the first book and even clearer in this, that Tabitha is Black. Jim Burns does Colin Greenland every credit with the cover of Seasons of Plenty, though, and even borrowed Greenland’s favourite leather coat to clothe Tabitha in.

In the same way that the reader of Gormenghast knows that the vast millennial stability of the castle-world can’t continue, that it contains the seeds of its own destruction in the sparks of life pushing up through it, so it’s similar with Plenty. Too much has the potential to destroy it. The signs are there allright, portents and strangely-appearing holograms, but Tabitha doesn’t know what a Boojum is, so can the signs speak to her? Alice’s persona won’t tell her because once installed in the echoing caverns of Plenty, where the shadows lie, she changes. Graffiti reading SCRATCH TABBYCAT might mean more to Captain Jute’s old street-fighting self. Trouble is, she isn’t that old self now. Trying to keep together a ship, and herself, with just her and her former shipmate Dodger and a handful of others, ain’t easy when the world starts to turn odd at the edges, and "Fears start to sweep through the civilised world like fashions". Being on Plenty is worse than being on a ship, because there is literally nothing else while they are in hyperspace: the star voyagers are "living like beetles in a rock". Meanwhile the whole of Plenty’s fervid and varied population is splitting, remerging, killing one another off, and I’m sure that’s Timothy Leary dispensing drugs and wisdom from his hospital bed.

Seasons of Plenty is anarchic space opera, and it’s strange, unpredictable, and tremendous fun to read, while all the time a feeling of things starting to fall apart builds up. It’s the second volume of what is now called "The Tabitha Jute Trilogy", so after the initial phase of ‘Wrongness’, in which a problem is presented, this second volume is the phase of ‘Thinning’, in which events build up to a point where they have to be redeemed some way in the third volume.