This is one of those series you start reading and then wonder why you keep on reading it. Seriously, why did I keep doing that to myself? When first I read of Nicholas Ewing Seafort in Midshipman's Hope -- the beginning of The Seafort Saga -- I spent days afterward sighing listlessly at the futility of life and filled with a sense of all-pervading dread. When I recovered, and read the next in the series, Challenger's Hope, I then considered entering a life of quiet contemplation and renouncing Science Fiction in all its forms there ever after. And by the time I read Patriarch’s Hope, the sixth book in the series, life had near-to lost all its meaning.

These books are so incredibly, overwhelmingly, depressingly sad. And yet they leave one so filled with, well, hope that one can't help but go back into the Hell-future of Nicholas Ewing Seafort that they provide, just on the slightest chance that things might get better for the poor boy.

When Midshipman Nick Seafort, a teenager just out of the Academy and on his first stellar cruise, is forced to take command of the starship Hibernia and fight off challenges to his authority, a corrupted sentient computer, several mutinies and an alien menace, it is a heart-wrenching, soul-searing read. His continued career in the Navy (but, the space kind, naturally), and then later in politics, is as despair ridden as can possibly be imagined. These books see Nick betray and betrayed, destroy and destroyed -- and, oh Lord, they see him suffer. In the last two books of this spirit-sucking series, Patriarch’s Hope and Children of Hope, even Nick’s kids get in on the suffering, too. Author David Feintuch died in 2006, and so it seems likely that puts an end to the torture… though rumors abound that a follow up tome, allegedly named Galahad’s Hope, was completed prior to his death. Oh, say it isn’t so!

The specifics this series are too numerous and too damn painful to dwell upon. That notwithstanding, this is not a series of books that can be easily forgotten -- or easily given up. Each time a new installment was released I would vow to myself: no. Not this time, David Bloody Feintuch. You won't catch me returning to your goddam universe of horror and despair. But each time I would succumb to that metallic paperback cover... and always that hope. The hope that, surely, just once, I wouldn't end a Seafort novel in uncontrollable sobs of grief for those who never existed, and an inconsolable sorrow that they never will.

It never once happened.

Feintuch's writing holds a power little seen in Science Fiction, an honesty that burns like the acid rain he predicts, and a bleak despondency that is all the more frightening for being so very realistic. I do not like his books, and I will always resent the hours I spent reading of the troubled Nick Seafort and his cohorts, but I am forever changed for having read them. Maybe even in a good way.

N.B. It is also worth mentioning that these books are God-y. Very God-y. Just sayin’.

  -- Rachel Hyland