Review: The Scavenger Door, by Suzanne Palmer

The Scavenger Door is a science fiction adventure and the third book of the Finder Chronicles. While each of the books of this series stand alone reasonably well, I would still read the series in order. Each book has some spoilers for the previous book.

Fergus is back on Earth following the events of Driving the Deep, at loose ends and annoying his relatives. To get him out of their hair, his cousin sends him into the Scottish hills to find a friend's missing flock of sheep. Fergus finds things professionally, but usually not livestock. It's an easy enough job, though; the lead sheep was wearing a tracker and he just has to get close enough to pick it up. The unexpected twist is also finding a metal fragment buried in a hillside that has some strange resonance with the unwanted gift that Fergus got in Finder.

Fergus's alien friend Ignatio is so alarmed by the metal fragment that he turns up in person in Fergus's cousin's bar in Scotland. Before he arrives, Fergus gets a mysteriously infuriating warning visit from alien acquaintances he does not consider friends. He has, as usual, stepped into something dangerous and complicated, and now somehow it's become his problem.

So, first, we get lots of Ignatio, who is an enthusiastic large ball of green fuzz with five limbs who mostly speaks English but does so from an odd angle. This makes me happy because I love Ignatio and his tendency to take things just a bit too literally.

SANTO'S, the sign read. Under it, in smaller letters, was CURIOSITIES AND INCONVENIENCES FOR COMMENDABLE SUMS.

"Inconveniences sound just like my thing," Fergus said. "You two want to wait in the car while I check it out?"

"Oh, no, I am not missing this," Isla said, and got out of the podcar.

"I am uncertain," Ignatio said. "I would like some curiouses, but not any inconveniences. Please proceed while I decide, and if there is also murdering or calamity or raisins, you will yell right away, yes?"

Also, if your story setup requires a partly-understood alien artifact that the protagonist can get some explanations for but not have the mystery neatly solved for them, Ignatio's explanations are perfect.

"It is a door. A doorbell. A... peephole? A key. A control light. A signal. A stop-and-go sign. A road. A bridge. A beacon. A call. A map. A channel. A way," Ignatio said. "It is a problem to explain. To say a doorkey is best, and also wrong. If put together, a path may be opened."

"And then?"

"And then the bad things on the other side, who we were trying to lock away, will be free to travel through."

Second, the thing about Palmer's writing that continues to impress me is her ability to take a standard science fiction plot, one whose variations I've read probably dozens of times before, and still make it utterly engrossing. This book is literally a fetch quest. There are a bunch of scattered fragments, Fergus has to find them and keep them from being assembled, various other people are after the same fragments, and Fergus either has to get there first or get the fragments back from them. If you haven't read this book before, you've played the video game or watched the movie. The threat is basically a Stargate SG-1 plot. And yet, this was so much fun.

The characters are great. This book leans less on found family than the last one and a bit more on actual family. When I started reading this series, Fergus felt a bit bland in the way that adventure protagonists sometimes can, but he's fleshed out nicely as the series goes along. He's not someone who tends to indulge in big emotions, but now the reader can tell that's because he's the kind of person who finds things to do in order to keep from dwelling on things he doesn't want to think about. He's unflappable in a quietly competent way while still having a backstory and emotional baggage and a rich inner life that the reader sees in glancing fragments.

We get more of Fergus's backstory, particularly around Mars, but I like that it's told in anecdotes and small pieces. The last thing Fergus wants to do is wallow in his past trauma, so he doesn't and finds something to do instead. There's just enough detail around the edges to deepen his character without turning the book into a story about Fergus's emotions and childhood. It's a tricky balancing act that Palmer handles well.

There are also more sentient ships, and I am so in favor of more sentient ships.

"When I am adding a new skill, I import diagnostic and environmental information specific to my platform and topology, segregate the skill subroutines to a dedicated, protected logical space, run incremental testing on integration under all projected scenarios and variables, and then when I am persuaded the code is benevolent, an asset, and provides the functionality I was seeking, I roll it into my primary processing units," Whiro said. "You cannot do any of that, because if I may speak in purely objective terms you may incorrectly interpret as personal, you are made of squishy, unreliable goo."

We get the normal pieces of a well-done fetch quest: wildly varying locations, some great local characters (the US-based trauma surgeons on vacation in Australia were my favorites), and believable antagonists. There are two other groups looking for the fragments, and while one of them is the standard villain in this sort of story, the other is an apocalyptic cult whose members Fergus mostly feels sorry for and who add just the right amount of surreality to the story. The more we find out about them, the more believable they are, and the more they make this world feel like realistic messy chaos instead of the obvious (and boring) good versus evil patterns that a lot of adventure plots collapse into.

There are things about this book that I feel like I should be criticizing, but I just can't. Fetch quests are usually synonymous with lazy plotting, and yet it worked for me. The way Fergus gets dumped into the middle of this problem starts out feeling as arbitrary and unmotivated as some video game fetch quest stories, but by the end of the book it starts to make sense. The story could arguably be described as episodic and cliched, and yet I was thoroughly invested. There are a few pacing problems at the very end, but I was too invested to care that much. This feels like a book that's better than the sum of its parts.

Most of the story is future-Earth adventure with some heist elements. The ending goes in a rather different direction but stays at the center of the classic science fiction genre. The Scavenger Door reaches a satisfying conclusion, but there are a ton of unanswered questions that will send me on to the fourth (and reportedly final) novel in the series shortly.

This is great stuff. It's not going to win literary awards, but if you're in the mood for some classic science fiction with fun aliens and neat ideas, but also benefiting from the massive improvements in characterization the genre has seen in the past forty years, this series is perfect. Highly recommended.

Followed by Ghostdrift.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Review: The Sky Road, by Ken MacLeod

The Sky Road is the fourth book in the Fall Revolution series, but it represents an alternate future that diverges after (or during?) the events of The Sky Fraction. You probably want to read that book first, but I'm not sure reading The Stone Canal or The Cassini Division adds anything to this book other than frustration. Much more on that in a moment.

Clovis colha Gree is a aspiring doctoral student in history with a summer job as a welder. He works on the platform for the project, which the reader either slowly discovers from the book or quickly discovers from the cover is a rocket to get to orbit. As the story opens, he meets (or, as he describes it) is targeted by a woman named Merrial, a tinker who works on the guidance system. The early chapters provide only a few hints about Clovis's world: a statue of the Deliverer on a horse that forms the backdrop of their meeting, the casual carrying of weapons, hints that tinkers are socially unacceptable, and some division between the white logic and the black logic in programming.

Also, because this is a Ken MacLeod novel, everyone is obsessed with smoking and tobacco the way that the protagonists of erotica are obsessed with sex.

Clovis's story is one thread of this novel. The other, told in the alternating chapters, is the story of Myra Godwin-Davidova, chair of the governing Council of People's Commissars of the International Scientific and Technical Workers' Republic, a micronation embedded in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. Series readers will remember Myra's former lover, David Reid, as the villain of The Stone Canal and the head of the corporation Mutual Protection, which is using slave labor (sort of) to support a resurgent space movement and its attempt to take control of a balkanized Earth. The ISTWR is in decline and a minor power by all standards except one: They still have nuclear weapons.

So, first, we need to talk about the series divergence.

I know from reading about this book on-line that The Sky Road is an alternate future that does not follow the events of The Stone Canal and The Cassini Division. I do not know this from the text of the book, which is completely silent about even being part of a series.

More annoyingly, while the divergence in the Earth's future compared to The Cassini Division is obvious, I don't know what the Jonbar hinge is. Everything I can find on-line about this book is maddeningly coy. Wikipedia claims the divergence happens at the end of The Sky Fraction. Other reviews and the Wikipedia talk page claim it happens in the middle of The Stone Canal. I do have a guess, but it's an unsatisfying one and I'm not sure how to test its correctness. I suppose I shouldn't care and instead take each of the books on their own terms, but this is the type of thing that my brain obsesses over, and I find it intensely irritating that MacLeod didn't explain it in the books themselves. It's the sort of authorial trick that makes me feel dumb, and books that gratuitously make me feel dumb are less enjoyable to read.

The second annoyance I have with this book is also only partly its fault. This series, and this book in particular, is frequently mentioned as good political science fiction that explores different ways of structuring human society. This was true of some of the earlier books in a surprisingly superficial way. Here, I would call it hogwash.

This book, or at least the Myra portion of it, is full of people doing politics in a tactical sense, but like the previous books of this series, that politics is mostly embedded in personal grudges and prior romantic relationships. Everyone involved is essentially an authoritarian whose ability to act as they wish is only contested by other authoritarians and is largely unconstrained by such things as persuasion, discussions, elections, or even theory. Myra and most of the people she meets are profoundly cynical and almost contemptuous of any true discussion of political systems. This is the trappings and mechanisms of politics without the intellectual debate or attempt at consensus, turning it into a zero-sum game won by whoever can threaten the others more effectively.

Given the glowing reviews I've seen in relatively political SF circles, presumably I am missing something that other people see in MacLeod's approach. Perhaps this level of pettiness and cynicism is an accurate depiction of what it's like inside left-wing political movements. (What an appalling condemnation of left-wing political movements, if so.) But many of the on-line reviews lead me to instead conclude that people's understanding of "political fiction" is stunted and superficial. For example, there is almost nothing Marxist about this book — it contains essentially no economic or class analysis whatsoever — but MacLeod uses a lot of Marxist terminology and sets half the book in an explicitly communist state, and this seems to be enough for large portions of the on-line commentariat to conclude that it's full of dangerous, radical ideas. I find this sadly hilarious given that MacLeod's societies tend, if anything, towards a low-grade libertarianism that would be at home in a Robert Heinlein novel. Apparently political labels are all that's needed to make political fiction; substance is optional.

So much for the politics. What's left in Clovis's sections is a classic science fiction adventure in which the protagonist has a radically different perspective from the reader and the fun lies in figuring out the world-building through the skewed perspective of the characters. This was somewhat enjoyable, but would have been more fun if Clovis had any discernible personality. Sadly he instead seems to be an empty receptacle for the prejudices and perspective of his society, which involve a lot of quasi-religious taboos and an essentially magical view of the world. Merrial is a more interesting character, although as always in this series the romance made absolutely no sense to me and seemed to be conjured by authorial fiat and weirdly instant sexual attraction.

Myra's portion of the story was the part I cared more about and was more invested in, aided by the fact that she's attempting to do something more interesting than launch a crewed space vehicle for no obvious reason. She at least faces some true moral challenges with no obviously correct response. It's all a bit depressing, though, and I found Myra's unwillingness to ground her decisions in a more comprehensive moral framework disappointing. If you're going to make a protagonist the ruler of a communist state, even an ironic one, I'd like to hear some real political philosophy, some theory of sociology and economics that she used to justify her decisions. The bits that rise above personal animosity and vibes were, I think, said better in The Cassini Division.

This series was disappointing, and I can't say I'm glad to have read it. There is some small pleasure in finishing a set of award-winning genre books so that I can have a meaningful conversation about them, but the awards failed to find me better books to read than I would have found on my own. These aren't bad books, but the amount of enjoyment I got out of them didn't feel worth the frustration. Not recommended, I'm afraid.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Review: Dark Matters, by Michelle Diener

Dark Matters is the fourth book in the science fiction semi-romance Class 5 series. There are spoilers for all of the previous books, and although enough is explained that you could make sense of the story starting here, I wouldn't recommend it. As with the other books in the series, it follows new protagonists, but the previous protagonists make an appearance.

You will be unsurprised to hear that the Tecran kidnapped yet another Earth woman. The repetitiveness of the setup would be more annoying if the book took itself too seriously, but it doesn't, and so I mostly find it entertaining. I thought Diener was going to dodge the obvious series structure, but now I am wondering if we're going to end up with one woman per Class 5 ship after all.

Lucy is not on a ship, however, Tecran or otherwise. She is a captive in a military research facility on the Tecran home world. The Tecran are in very deep trouble given the events of the previous book and have decided that Lucy's existence is a liability. Only the intervention of some sympathetic Tecran scientists she partly befriended during her captivity lets her escape the facility before it's destroyed. Now she's alone, on an alien world, being hunted by the military.

It's not entirely the fault of this book that it didn't tell the story that I wanted to read. The setup for Dark Matters implies this book will see the arrival of consequences for the Tecran's blatant violations of the Sentient Beings Agreement. I was looking forward to a more political novel about how such consequences could be administered. This is the sort of problem that we struggle with in our politics: Collective punishment isn't acceptable, but there have to be consequences sufficient to ensure that a state doesn't repeat the outlawed behavior, and yet attempting to deliver those consequences feels like occupation and can set off worse social ruptures and even atrocities. I wasn't expecting that deep of political analysis of what is, after all, a lighthearted SF adventure series, but Diener has been willing to touch on hard problems. The ethics of violence has been an ongoing theme of the series.

Alas for me, this is not what we get. The arriving cavalry, in the form of a Class 5 and the inevitable Grih hunk to serve as the love interest du jour, quickly become more interested in helping Lucy elude pursuers (or escape captors) than in the delicate political situation. The conflict between the local population is a significant story element, but only as backdrop. Instead, this reads like a thriller or an action movie, complete with alien predators and a cinematic set piece finale.

The political conflict between the Tecran and the United Council does reach a conclusion of sorts, but it's not that satisfying. Perhaps some of the political fallout will happen in future books, but here Diener simplifies the morality of the story in the climax and dodges out of the tricky ethical and social challenge of how to punish a sovereign nation. One of the things I like about this series is that it takes moral indignation seriously, but now that Diener has raised the (correct) complication that people have strong motivations to find excuses for the actions of their own side, I hope she can find a believable political resolution that isn't simple brute force.

This entry in the series wasn't bad, but it didn't grab me. Lucy was fine as a protagonist; her ability to manipulate the Tecran into making mistakes fits the longer time she's had to study them and keeps her distinct from the other protagonists. But the small bit of politics we do see is unsatisfying and conveniently simplistic, and this book mostly degenerates into generic action sequences. Bane, the Class 5 ship featured in this story, is great when he's active, and I continue to be entertained by the obsession the Class 5 ships have with Earth women, but he's sidelined for too much of the story. I felt like Diener focused on the least interesting part of the story setup.

If you've read this far, there's nothing wrong with this entry. You'll probably want to keep reading. But it felt like a missed opportunity.

Followed in publication order by Dark Ambitions, a novella that returns to Rose to tell a side story. The next novel is Dark Class, in which we'll presumably see the last kidnapped Earth woman.

Rating: 6 out of 10