Author: Jack McDevitt
Publisher: Penguin
Rating: WARTY!
I'm a huge fan of Jack McDevitt. For me he's the best space-travel sci-fi author out there. He has two series (as well as many stand-alones and a plethora of short stories), both of which are set in the same universe, but centuries apart. The earlier one is the Priscilla Hutchins series, the later one is the Alex Benedict series. When I read the last of the Hutchins series prior to this, I thought it was over because he had aged Hutchins, and pretty much retired her from piloting, so imagine the thrill I got when I saw this one on the library shelf! What he's done is written a prequel, taking us back to before Hutchins became a respected and seasoned space pilot - to the point where she was training to be one. This is a good move but it’s hard to see this going anywhere else because he's pretty much Ourobourosed himself now!
This novel starts with a false emergency on board the Copperhead, her small training ship, captained by Jake Loomis. It quickly moves on to a real emergency: a cargo ship that has been roped into a passenger transport role taking a dozen or so school girls from the Middle East on a space trip as a reward for their performance in a science contest. Unfortunately, an anti-terraforming group placed a bomb on the ship, designed to take out the engines. They did not expect there to be any extraneous passengers since this is a cargo ship, and no one was supposed to get hurt. Now it’s damaged and needs to have the passengers taken off since it's in a decaying orbit.
The Copperhead is the closest ship, but its capacity is too small to sustain that many people for any great length of time. The cargo ship could sustain them, but its orbit is decaying too fast, so they have to secure the passengers and hang in there until a larger ship can reach them. The Copperhead can safe-harbor the passengers until the other ship gets there - if it gets there soon enough - but there is a shortfall in supply and demand, and the pilot of the cargo ship ends up killing himself in order to spare enough oxygen to sustain the rest of them long enough for the other ship to come in and complete the rescue.
I have several problems with this. The first is that the problem with the cargo ship isn't that it is unlivable, but that it’s in a decaying orbit, so no one can stay aboard until help arrives. My problem with this is that never once is it considered a possibility that they could use the Copperhead to boost the orbit of the cargo craft. This is done all the time with the International Space Station by visiting transport craft, so I don’t get what the problem was here. This is just bad writing. It would have been easy enough to simply have had someone raise that possibility and then for it to be dismissed for reason 'X'.
The second issue was the dwindling oxygen. McDevitt writes it like the ship has a fixed supply and once that's gone, you're screwed, but this is bullshit! Several hundred years into the future, and they don’t have the same CO2 recycling that we already have today in spacecraft today? So this rescue was a great start to the story, but it lacks all credibility if you look at it too closely. The offshoot of this is that Hutchins gets her pilot's license and Loomis, who has serious survivor guilt, retires. It turns out that the bomber, a guy called Leon, is an old friend of his - someone both he and Hutchins had spoken to not that long before. The bomber tracks down Loomis at his remote Virginia cabin and apologizes to him, but Loomis fails to call it in. That's two big strikes against him now. I have a feeling he's being set up to do something brave and fatal later in the story.
The smaller oxygen issue is that no effort seems to be made to conserve what they have. Everyone could have lain down and relaxed (as much as was humanly possible in the circumstances), and they could also have explored the possibility of bringing air over from the crippled cargo ship until that ship dropped too low in its orbit, but this wasn't even considered. Again it’s bad writing. This possibility could have at least been raised if only to then be dismissed in some way, but to not even bring it up doesn’t speak well of an author, because you know readers are going to ask "Why not?" so you might as well deal with it up front. Fortunately, McDevitt writes such good stories overall that I'm willing to forgive him for his trespasses against solid writing on most cases.
Hutchins goes down to Earth to visit her mom, but she gets called in by Kosmik, the space transportation corporation to which she applied for a piloting job. They hired her, but now they need her to start early because something came up. The story continues from there.
I have to say that this is without doubt the weakest novel Jack McDevitt has ever written. It had the potential to be great, but it ended-up being a sad and amateurish story that went nowhere, had no plot, and was one in which even the main character, Priscilla Hutchins ("Hutch"), was boring, which is a travesty. It’s billed on the cover as "a Priscilla Hutchins novel" but it’s as much about Jake Loomis, her mentor, as it is about her. I can’t remember the last novel I read where the star of the series was forced to take a back-seat to another character!
Jake is offered up as the experienced master adventurer, and she's relegated to being the little lady exploring her juvenile "love" interest, and conducting space station tours like she's a teenage volunteer. It’s pathetic. Way to trash your main character, Jack! While Captain Jake is off investigating the most interesting thing - the rogue planet - Hutch is relegated to chauffeuring a politician who originally wanted to cut-back the space program, but who has now changed his mind.
The story isn't at all like McDevitt's other adventures in this series, where there's action, big discoveries, adventure, fun and new things to learn. It’s more like a dear diary of trivia, a kind of 'what I did during the summer holidays' essay where all you did was hang around home, sunbathe, and watch TV. There's a rogue planet, but instead of this being the centerpiece of the novel, it's tacked on at the end almost as though McDevitt realized he had blown this story, and was now desperately forcing this on the ass-end, to try and get some attention when it wiggles.
One of Hutch's biggest problems (other than being trivialized, that is) is her relationship with Cal, an actor who apparently falls into insta-love with her, and she finds nothing wrong with this. She encourages and entertains him, even though she doesn’t feel the same way, and even though his entire attraction to her is painfully and obviously based solely on his perception that she's "beautiful". He never has a word to say about her skills and abilities, her career choices, her mind, her smarts, her decency, the kind of person she is. All he can ever say about her relates directly back to him: how beautiful he thinks she is, and how much he misses her. It's sick and pathetic. The fact that she finds nothing wrong with this at all reeks of bullshit, and makes me think only of how dumb and blind she is. It's written like a young adult novel and frankly, if I'd read this one first, before any of his others in this series, I never would have gone on to read the series.
One odd and striking thing is the conversations which Hutch and Cal have. It’s not just theirs, but it is the most noticeable to me when they converse. When you're talking with someone, you don’t normally say their name every time it’s your turn to speak, but that's pretty much what we tend to get with conversations here, and it’s particularly noticeable between Hutch and Cal. It just feels really false. I don't think McDevitt knows how to write romance.
Another odd thing is McDevitt's addiction to depicting, in tedious detail, everything that these people do during their trips through what he calls "Barber space". This is the 'transition dimension' between the start and end of an interstellar jump. This Barber space trip can take a month or more and is a proportional function of how many light years away the destination is. There's no explanation offered as to why this is so.
Inside Barber space it looks like the spacecraft is enveloped in fog, and not moving - or hardly moving. Ships have been lost in this space, but other than that, it’s travel time, where (subjective) days and nights pass, and people have to find things to do - like watching movies, or reading, or playing games - to pass the time. The problem is that McDevitt seems obsessed with detailing every novel or movie Hutch (and everyone else) reads or watches during this time. It’s boring, but this is something he does in every novel in this series (and in his Benedict series). It’s not confined just to this one, and it rarely does a thing to advance the story.
I hate to say this, but I cannot recommend this novel. It's nothing like up to the standard of the rest of this series, and I have to question why it was even written. I do recommend the others in this series, however.
