There’s something about portals. Instant travel from one point to another, across the galaxy or across the universe, inevitably built by some vanished prior highly advanced civilization? It’s a persistently popular trope in science fiction, with the Stargate franchise and The Expanse being two of its its most well-known onscreen examples, and many more in novels. Nor, I think, is it any big mystery why the idea keeps recurring—portals or even natural wormholes are impossible, and what spaceflight we do have is limited and slow. But in fiction, humanity and other species can travel the stars, and frequently do discover networks of left-behind portals ripe for exploration and exploitation, taking characters and readers to other worlds almost instantaneously.
Timothy Zahn’s seven-volume Icarus Saga, which concludes in The Icarus Coda, takes the portal concept and runs with it. The books are set in our galaxy, where a quasi-mythical species known as the Icari or the Gold Ones created a network of portals between worlds and then, several thousand years ago, vanished. Economic dominance in the galaxy is contested between alien species the Ammei and the Patth, and protagonists human Gregory Roarke and his partner Selene, one of the rare alien Kadolians, have spent years working with the shadowy human Icarus Agency, which seeks to find as many of the Icari portals as possible to give humans a political and economic leg up. The Kadolians, who once worked closely with the Icari, lost their home when the Icari left and the full knowledge of the portal network was lost, and Selene has spent her life on a quest to try to find their lost homeworld.
By the time The Icarus Coda opens, Gregory and Selene have left a reorganized Icarus Agency with some bad blood between them and its head General Kinnemann, and they’re also the targets of an illegal vendetta by a certain Patth clan due to their actions in prior books, for which the clan has targeted not only them but everyone who knows them. Still hunting for a particular portal whose location could be bartered to get some of the heat off their backs, they meet a mysterious alien named Bubloo in a barbecue restaurant, and from there the plot is off to a raring start.
As it happens, I read and enjoyed the first book in the series, The Icarus Hunt (2000), when it came out, which turns out to have only limited bearing on the latter six books since the first one has different protagonists. The Icarus Hunt also has perhaps my favorite of Zahn’s trademark narrative twists, but Coda serves them up in spades, if not quite on the same grand scale as Hunt did. And although there are some references and finer details that still remained a little unclear (such as the exact interior geometry of portals), Zahn excels at deploying enough information to keep the reader oriented while moving the book along at a good clip. Even without having read most or all of the preceding books in the saga, Coda is an enjoyable read for anyone who likes competent characters who remain calm under fire, twisty plot dilemmas, and narrative twists perpetrated against both the protagonists and the reader.
It feels weird to call Timothy Zahn unpopular or obscure when he’s written over seventy science fiction novels since 1970 and of course, famously, was the first (and, many of us would argue, still the best) novelist to work in what became known as the Star Wars Extended Universe, starting with Heir to the Empire (1991). Although Disney unceremoniously put the old EU out to pasture once it bought Lucasfilm, the EU and Zahn’s contributions to it continue to form a rich substrate of ideas and worldbuilding that Star Wars creatives draw on: Zahn christened the galaxy far far away’s capital planet, Coruscant, for starters, and his Grand Admiral Thrawn proved so popular that he made the jump from books to animation to live action, with Zahn writing more Thrawn novels set in the new canon and serving as a consultant on the Disney+ show Ahsoka (2023-).
Zahn is, then, obviously not unpopular or obscure; he won a Hugo Award in 1984 and has won the popular vote-based Dragon Award five times, three of them for non-Star Wars work. But it’s undeniable that the kind of solid action-adventure science fiction novels he writes have fallen out of favor with mainstream tastemakers in the genre, even as Zahn himself remains popular with the vast swathes of readers who love action-adventure and who don’t pay much attention to the critics. When I stood in line for what was supposed to be a one-hour Zahn signing at Emerald City Comic Con in 2019, enough of us were there that the line took more than two hours to get through—and Zahn graciously stayed for all of us.
So: Readers clearly love what Zahn does, and you don’t get to write more than seventy novels with multiple publishers if the sales aren’t there to back it up. But the awards and critical accolades aren’t there, and it’s interesting to think about why. For one thing, Zahn does not deal in great depths of psychological interiority for his characters. This is not to say that he is thin on characterization per se, or that he can’t create memorable characters: Thrawn is obviously indelible, and Zahn has been a good steward of existing Star Wars characters, giving our heroes believable character development while keeping them recognizably the people from the movies. (He also created Mara Jade, another indelible, wholly original fan favorite character.) But Zahn’s primary tool for characterization is describing characters’ actions, rather than what they think about themselves. This authorial choice is well-suited to his chosen mode of briskly plotted, well thought-out action, but it does give the impression that character is less important to him than plot.
POV choice plays a role here too. In the original Thrawn trilogy we never see inside Thrawn’s head; instead he is observed by the loyal Watson to his Holmes, Captain Pellaeon. The Icarus Saga sticks to first-person POV, with protagonists Jordan (Hunt) and then Gregory (the other six books). First person is a good choice for pulling the wool over characters’ eyes; one of Zahn’s signature moves is a POV character not giving the full details about something crucial in their narration, as when Gregory relates:
I spent much of my alone time poring over the security recordings Mindi had sent me before we left Juniper. Particularly interesting were the sections where up to a third of the image was washed out by some clearly artificial glow. It took a great deal of observation, analysis, and deduction before I finally figured that one out. (p. 180)
Zahn here is clearly signaling one of his trademark twists, but these twists are almost always ones the reader simply has to sit back and enjoy rather than try to work out for themselves. Having read quite a few Zahn novels, I do enjoy this game; but it takes some getting used to.
Recently on Bluesky, Elias Eells of Bar Cart Bookshelf said something to the effect that series should be written in such a way that any reader can jump in at any point and be able to understand and enjoy what’s going on. Certainly many long series in the genre can and do become impossible to start reading much later than the beginning, and this does have a certain gatekeeping effect for prospective readers. (For example, it’s too late for me to start reading One Piece, with 114 volumes of the manga and counting. I ain’t reading all that, but I’m happy for you if you do and are.)
The Icarus Coda is a good example of the payoffs and pitfalls of Eells’s preferred approach, where it’s possible to jump in at the end of a series after a twenty-five-year gap and more or less understand and enjoy the book. Did I get the full impact of certain spoilery events in the back half, which I’m sure have been built up in the five books I didn’t read? Did I understand all the nuances of certain interactions between characters? Undoubtedly not. But I had a good time, even if I’m not particularly fussed to go back and read those other five books. This may be the drawback of a more welcoming series approach—by eschewing the kind of deep worldbuilding and character work that makes a long running series impenetrable, a series may also be neglecting opportunities to hook readers deeply. Both approaches have merit, even if I tend to prefer the less easily accessible one.
Ultimately, The Icarus Coda is a polished example of Timothy Zahn doing what Timothy Zahn does best. If you haven’t read Zahn, it’s well worth it to read at least one of his books, and if you’ve only read his Star Wars books, it’s worth it to read one of his original novels. There are probably better books to choose for that purpose than the final entry in a seven-volume series, but rest assured, he sticks the landing.