This post contains spoilers for the end of the novel Grimspace. 

I recently finished re-reading Grimspace by Ann Aguirre. I originally read it a few years ago, but I just got the rest of the series (there are six books in total) so I figured I would re-read it so I could remember everything I needed to remember before reading the other five. 

Grimspace is a first-person POV novel about a hyperspace jumper, Sirantha Jax, who is accused of causing a massive accident that killed more than 80 people. She is broken out of corporate prison by March and his team for the purposes of discovering jumpers that may not be aligned with the evil corporation that monopolizes space travel. 

The reason I’m writing this post is because of something that the end of the book made me think about. Twelve years ago, I attended a two-week intensive fiction writing seminar taught by two authors who between them have published dozens of novels and short-stories. I learned a lot, and I was also lucky enough to be selected for an exercise called “plot breaking“, where a novel I was working on was broken down into its component parts and as a group the fifteen attendees of the seminar rebuilt the plot into something that was far better than its original state. In my first draft of the outline, we follow one character, but at the end while he’s fighting the villain his girlfriend (who has similar powers to the protagonist) does something that ends the fight in the protagonist’s favor. It was determined that the book would have a more powerful ending if the protagonist was the one to defeat the villain, instead of someone else having to do it for him. 

For what it’s worth, I have yet to finish this book, and I’m not even sure where the plot breaking results are. I thought I took a picture of them and saved it to the cloud but I haven’t been able to find it. 

Anyway. 

In the final act of Grimspace, Jax is kidnapped by a bounty hunter, Velith. He seems to have a sense of honor, enough that as long as Jax behaves herself he will comport himself kindly and politely. She talks to him, learns more about him, and does something that gets him thinking maybe she isn’t at fault for the accident after all. Some other stuff happens, bolstering this idea in Velith, and at the end of the book Velith exposes the conspiracy that the evil corporation was perpetrating against the rest of the galaxy. (Think about the end of the movie Serenity, where Mal transmits Mr. Universe’s message.) This exonerates Jax and sets up the next novel. 

Velith is only in about 15 percent of the book, if that. And, while Jax is instrumental in turning him to her side, it’s Velith himself who does the action that, in Serenity, Mal himself did. In Serenity, it was more impactful because Mal was the main character and protagonist, and the audience is meant to identify with him and root for him. Similarly, Aguirre builds up Jax as a character we can identify with and root for, but when it comes to the end of the book, Jax doesn’t actually do the deed that takes down the antagonist. Someone else does. 

The authors running my seminar, as well as the other attendees, all agreed that my book would be better served by the protagonist defeating the antagonist directly, and we came up with a way to do that. I believe that the ending of Grimspace would’ve been more powerful had Jax been the one to collect the information and transmit the message that took down the corporation. Admittedly, I can’t figure out how that would have been done, but then, it’s not my job; it’s the author’s. 

I’m not really upset with the end of Grimspace; because it ends similarly to Serenity, which I enjoyed and have seen multiple times, I identify with it and have good feelings about it. But as an author myself, looking at it with a critical eye, I wonder if there was a way for the protagonist to somehow strike the final blow, and how that would have changed the novel and my perception of it.