The Folded Sky by Elizabeth Bear

 

I grabbed this after enjoying the first two books Ms. Bear wrote in this setting, and this is nowhere near the romp especially Ancestral Night is, but it is a very good novel. It doesn't have as much sparkle as I remember the other two novels having, and it does drag some through the first half or so--things take a long time to get into place for inciting events, and some of that feels really slow and overly granular in detail to me. The prose is still really good, and the characters are mostly well-defined, and the setting has a lot of stuff going on in it, some of which feels ... not entirely good, to me: not just the pirates, but there seems to be some sense that human psychology (and that of other sentients) just has too many hard-wired flaws to make for the kind of long-term viability needed for interstellar civilization, so there's like consensual brainwashing of a sort. Ms. Bear makes her characters seem like people, even if they're people with more, or at least more direct, control over their endocrine systems; and the story, when it does get into motion, works really well. In the Acknowledgments, Ms. Bear describes it as (paraphrasing) space opera crossed with family drama, and that's not wrong.