The problem with a series is that they tend to have beginnings and endings. When a series is well enough written that is a dilemma for readers as with the recent conclusion of the Harry Potter novels with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows but otherwise they are often a concern for the writer who wants to keep the story going and defer a final conclusion for as long as possible but is not sure how to do it except to further drag things out. While Karen Traviss' Matriarch does not suffer from this nearly as much as the following novel in the series, Ally, it has the decided feel of a worn sofa that has been padded out a bit too much.

Karen Traviss is best known for her Star Wars Expanded Universe merchandising novels but the Wess'har novels best reflect her concerns in what might be called the genre of Environmentalist Science Fiction. And like the previous Wess'har novels, Matriarch is heavily concerned with ecology and planetary environments as the center of everything. This is a far cry from the usual sort of Science Fiction novels where planets are terraformed and humans expanded throughout the stars. This is more the sort of novels that walk a step beyond even Ursula LeGuin to regard humans as basically brutish and uncivilized and a menace to the stars. That leads to some rather awkward science and an awkward future because ultimately Karen Traviss is far more interested in commenting on the present day than the future.

As a result despite being set centuries in the future, Matriarch still features a humanity with many of the same political structures of the present day, a Western and European hegemony, contrasted with a Muslim Australia and a Native American Canada (current demographics would indicate the situation is more likely to be reversed) and humanity may be able to travel between the stars but has only a temporary base on Mars. The humanity in the Wess'har mirrors Karen Traviss' disgust with the species which barely has a right to exist compared to cockroaches for their environmental depredations. Even the BBC appears to still exist (and a future for humanity in which the BBC still exists centuries from now while we can't even manage to settle Mars is truly a fate worse than death) and things are much like the way they are now, except everyone is taking environmental issues seriously, more seriously than now anyway.

Ideology and politics aside, Matriarch could still make for an interesting novel but Karen Traviss insists on filtering most events through characters who have little or nothing to do with them or are capable of altering them. Thus we have endless scenes of Eddie endlessly watching the Eqbas Vorhi dealing out destruction to the Isenji with no real reaction and with dulled emotion. None of the characters in the Matriarch much cares about the use of explosive and potentially even biological weapons on a planetary population by the Eqbas Vorhi raising the question of why we should or why we should care about any characters as apathetic as that?

Much of Matriarch is dedicated to Shan Franklin, not doing much of anything but romancing Ade while stewing in her fury at everyone. Shan Franklin is probably one of the more obnoxious characters I have ever had the misfortune to endure in a novel. Unfortunately she is the main character of the Wess'har novels. More unfortunately in Matriarch, Karen Traviss thinks it's enough for her to just show up and agonize over her endless reams of self-pity and hatred for the rest of the universe that she doesn't feel a mild tolerance for. It isn't. Her romance with Ade is fantastically soporific. While a world over, a civil war is being waged, Karen Traviss repeatedly cuts to the romance, ironically the same set of priorities Eddie stews over when BBChan overlooks his Isenji war broadcasts for local stories.

The only genuinely interesting part of Matriarch comes from Lindsay and Mohan Rayat, the perpetrators of the bombing on Bezer'ej, infected with the c'naatat virus, adapted by it to life undersea and helping the Bezer'eji rebuild their home by locating their maps and records. Here and only here does Karen Traviss fulfill the potential of Matriarch, examining the paradoxes of morality and learning to interact with an alien race while balancing questions of moral responsibility. Though the author's viewpoint on them seems little better than that of Shan Franklin, the reality is they are the only interesting characters in Matriarch because they are actually interacting and learning and becoming something different.

That is nothing something that can be said about Eddie who wanders apathetically through interstellar events and Shan Franklin who broods and stews. Shan Franklin, is essentially a bully's fantasy, the sort of self-righteous character capable of doing anything which writers create to beat up all the other characters morally inferior to them, which proves that a female writer is equally capable of generating such a bully's fantasy as a male one. Yet in Matriarch, Lindsay and Mohan Rayat emerge as the characters worth reading about. As Lindsay finally becomes the Matriarch, the final matriarch of the several matriarchs in the novel, Matriarch, she represents the only plot twist in the novel. But in her case it is a title she only has the right to because as flawed as her decisions may be, she does what she does out of a genuine concern for others. By contrast Shan Franklin is a Matriarch simply through force of personality with a generalized loathing for the rest of the universe. The Matriarch of the Eqbas Vorhi is simply doing a duty she wants to end as quickly as possible and has no concern for the lives she takes in the process, including those of the people she is supposed to be helping. Ironically it is Lindsay who emerges as the only character who cares about people rather than mere ideology and environmental principles.