Barsk is a novel of a many parts, let down by an inability to grasp some ineffable quality of grandeur. In the far future, science has proved the existence of souls, and a select group of Speakers can commune with the dead by taking the drug Koph, which grows only on one planet. All the humans are gone, and the sentient beings are various species of uplifted animals. Barsk, source of the drug, is also home to the despised Fants, descended from elephants. For 800 years, their world has been defined by the compact, where they provide pharmaceuticals including Koph to the galaxy, and the galaxy leaves them the hell alone, as laid out by the prophetic visions and political wiles of their long dead matriarch.

Into this mess stumbles Jorl, a Speaker of rare talent who faces a prophesied crises called the Silence. His quest involves the mysterious suicide of his best friend, his friend's troubled and gifted son Pizlo, a Senator willing to commit any crime to maintain his hold on power, and a new formulation of koph which turns the user into the next best thing to a God.

Now I read a lot of science-fiction, so this might be on me, but I can see where the main ideas of Barsk have been done before and with more style. The uplifted animals and messy galactic confederations are from David Brin, and there's a stylistic similarity with Brin beyond the uplift part, except that Brin at his best is pulpy and daring, where Barsk plods. The intermingling of precognition, politics, and a planet that is the sole source of a vital drug are the key elements of Dune, but Dune is a masterpiece which reflects some uncomfortable truths about human nature and potential, and Barsk falls into a mundane Zootopia style "species as destiny". The physical reality of souls, precocious children, and the term Speaker comes from Orson Scott Card's Ender series (though the speaking is very different, without the transgressive humanism of Card's Speakers for the Dead). And say what you will about Card, he has at times a keen eye for character and as a good a prose style as anyone in the genre. Again, Barsk is just average.

It's frustrating, because this isn't an bad book, and it kept me entertained all the way through, but it just had so little to say. There's a really good novella at the heart of this book, about a man (okay, elephant thing) who can intercede between the living and the dead, and how existing in that ultimate liminal space transforms his world. Does he heal traumas that we must learn to grieve over, or does he reopen wounds that are best left closed? Unfortunately, that novella is buried under a bunch of space opera cruft.