Review: Chilling Effect
Valerie Valdez 416 pages Harper Voyager (2019)
Read this if you like: Antihero starship captains, space romps, galaxy-scale worldbuilding
tl;dr summary: The misadventures of Captain Innocente and her crew, combining all the fun and action of sci-fi adventure pulp with relatable characters and next-level worldbuilding.
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The first chapter of Chilling Effect is a masterclass in starting in the middle of the action. By page 20, Captain Eva Innocente has already been double-crossed, wrangled psychic cats, and gotten a ransom note from a shadowy galactic crime syndicate.
And that pace never really slows. Cover to cover, this novel has the breakneck, action-packed plot of pulp sci-fi, just one of the many genre tropes and patterns that Valerie Valdez masterfully employs. The book’s framework is familiar: Captain Innocente is a one-time criminal turned down-on-her-luck smuggler with a heart of gold; her ship, La Serena Negra, is manned by a rag-tag crew, each with their own unique skillsets and baggage, a backstory that’s filled in as their respective checkered pasts catch up with them. Like in the tales it echoes, La Sirena Negra’s crew speeds from one adventure to the next and pulls the reader along with them. Add in a dash of slow-burn cross-species romance and it checks all the genre boxes in the best possible way.
Layered on top of these familiar elements is a refreshingly unique and relatable narrative voice, a close third anchored to Eva. To draw an analogy, Eva Innocente is to the space captain archetype what Tony Soprano is to the mob boss: she does all the same shit but with the self-awareness cranked up. She regrets her mistakes and dwells on their consequences; she has a clear personal moral code, even if she sometimes breaks it; she tries to do right by her friends and feels guilty when she fails. In short, she’s a fully-realized human, and the depth and complexity of the protagonist kept me turning the page as much as the non-stop action.
Another place Chilling Effect stands out is its worldbuilding. This starts in earnest in chapter 2 when the crew stops at Omicron station, a smart setting to establish the galactic scope and diversity of species who populate the novel. The quick tour of the station’s main merchant drag sets the reader up beautifully for the rotating cast of peripheral characters La Sirena Negra’s crew encounters on their travels, but the line that does the most heavy lifting is “Humans were in the minority, as usual”. One line, and we’re oriented in a truly galactic milieu, where human ethics, rules, and social norms may not apply. Valdez seizes this “anything goes” freedom gleefully. Among my favorite peripheral characters were the recurring annoyance of the Glorious Apotheosis and the “Jane Austen in space” vibe of the todyk, but each new world the ship visits has its own delightful details.
What impressed me the most from a world-building standpoint, though, was the way unique alien physiology was woven into the character-level narrative of Chilling Effect through the quennian Vakar. Quennians differ from humans in a plethora of ways, from their “pangolin-like skin” to their face-palps, but the key one for this discussion is that they convey emotions by changing their body odor. Valdez adds an extra layer of play by giving Captain Innocente a smell upgrade for her translator that doesn’t always know how to interpret Vakar’s scent. I love this detail for so many reasons. Bringing scent into descriptions makes the world more immersive, at the same time establishing the quennians as definitively alien—these aren’t just humans with weird skull ridges but something else entirely, and the regular reminder of Vakar’s alien-ness helps keep the reader firmly planted in a world where humans are the stated minority. Once the basic emotions are established it becomes a quick way to add subtext to Vakar’s dialogue. The presence or absence of certain smells is a narrative multi-tool, infusing scenes with tension, humor, mystery, or whatever other emotion the moment calls for.
If I have one critique, it’s the abruptness of the ending. This is on brand for the book, honestly, but there was part of me that missed the denouement and wasn’t ready yet to stop reading about these characters. Obviously this is just the first of what I hope is many Captain Innocente books, based on the teaser of Prime Deceptions in the back of my copy, so I suppose I’ll just have to get my hands on the next book to see what these quirky and delightful characters get up to next.
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