Fri, 02 Jan 2026 21:23:00 -0700

Review: Challenges of the Deeps, by Ryk E. Spoor

Series: | Arenaverse #3
Publisher: | Baen
Copyright: | March 2017
ISBN: | 1-62579-564-5
Format: | Kindle
Pages: | 438

Challenges of the Deeps is the third book in the throwback space opera Arenaverse series. It is a direct sequel to Spheres of Influence, but Spoor provides a substantial recap of the previous volumes for those who did not read the series in close succession (thank you!).

Ariane has stabilized humanity's position in the Arena with yet another improbable victory. (If this is a spoiler for previous volumes, so was telling you the genre of the book.) Now is a good opportunity to fulfill the promise humanity made to their ally Orphan: accompaniment on a journey into the uncharted deeps of the Arena for reasons that Orphan refuses to explain in advance. Her experienced crew provide multiple options to serve as acting Leader of Humanity until she gets back. What can go wrong?

The conceit of this series is that as soon as a species achieves warp drive technology, their ships are instead transported into the vast extradimensional structure of the Arena where a godlike entity controls the laws of nature and enforces a formal conflict resolution process that looks alternatingly like a sporting event, a dueling code, and technology-capped total war. Each inhabitable system in the real universe seems to correspond to an Arena sphere, but the space between them is breathable atmosphere filled with often-massive storms.

In other words, this is an airship adventure as written by E.E. "Doc" Smith. Sort of. There is an adventure, and there are a lot of airships (although they fight mostly like spaceships), but much of the action involves tense mental and physical sparring with a previously unknown Arena power with unclear motives.

My general experience with this series is that I find the Arena concept fascinating and want to read more about it, Spoor finds his much-less-original Hyperion Project in the backstory of the characters more fascinating and wants to write about that, and we reach a sort of indirect, grumbling (on my part) truce where I eagerly wait for more revelations about the Arena and roll my eyes at the Hyperion stuff. Talking about Hyperion in detail is probably a spoiler for at least the first book, but I will say that it's an excuse to embed versions of literary characters into the story and works about as well as most such excuses (not very). The characters in question are an E.E. "Doc" Smith mash-up, a Monkey King mash-up, and a number of other characters that are obviously references to something but for whom I lack enough hints to place (which is frustrating).

Thankfully we get far less human politics and a decent amount of Arena world-building in this installment. Hyperion plays a role, but mostly as foreshadowing for the next volume and the cause of a surprising interaction with Arena rules. One of the interesting wrinkles of this series is that humanity have an odd edge against the other civilizations in part because we're borderline insane sociopaths from the perspective of the established powers. That's an old science fiction trope, but I prefer it to the Campbell-style belief in inherent human superiority.

Old science fiction tropes are what you need to be in the mood for to enjoy this series. This is an unapologetic and intentional throwback to early pulp: individuals who can be trusted with the entire future of humanity because they're just that moral, super-science, psychic warfare, and even coruscating beams that would make E.E. "Doc" Smith proud. It's an occasionally glorious but mostly silly pile of technobabble, but Spoor takes advantage of the weird, constructed nature of the Arena to provide more complex rules than competitive superlatives.

The trick is that while this is certainly science fiction pulp, it's also a sort of isekai novel. There's a lot of anime and manga influence just beneath the surface. I'm not sure why it never occurred to me before reading this series that melodramatic anime and old SF pulps have substantial aesthetic overlap, but of course they do. I loved the Star Blazers translated anime that I watched as a kid precisely because it had the sort of dramatic set pieces that make the Lensman novels so much fun.

There is a bit too much Wu Kong in this book for me (although the character is growing on me a little), and some of the maneuvering around the mysterious new Arena actor drags on longer than was ideal, but the climax is great stuff if you're in the mood for dramatic pulp adventure. The politics do not bear close examination and the writing is serviceable at best, but something about this series is just fun. I liked this book much better than Spheres of Influence, although I wish Spoor would stop being so coy about the nature of the Arena and give us more substantial revelations. I'm also now tempted to re-read Lensman, which is probably a horrible idea. (Spoor leaves the sexism out of his modern pulp.)

If you got through Spheres of Influence with your curiosity about the Arena intact, consider this one when you're in the mood for modern pulp, although don't expect any huge revelations. It's not the best-written book, but it sits squarely in the center of a genre and mood that's otherwise a bit hard to find.

Followed by the Kickstarter-funded Shadows of Hyperion, which sadly looks like it's going to concentrate on the Hyperion Project again. I will probably pick that up... eventually.

Rating: 6 out of 10