Author: Jamie McFarlane
Publisher: Fickle Dragon Publishing
Rating: WORTHY!
This YA novel pulled me in and kept me reading right from the off even though I'm not the YA audience for which it’s intended. It’s really good, and it made me want to pursue the sequels, which is exactly what a well-written novel should do!
Let me preface this review by declaring that I have a few issues with sci-fi when it comes to stories about the colonization of space, and about trading and mining. Too many sci-fi writers seem to grossly underestimate the size of space and the cost of traveling in it, or if they knew these things, then they forget them rather quickly and comprehensively when it comes to writing their stories. I don't mind if they invent new technologies to explain how their space-farers travel much faster than ours can here in this reality. That's fine. I do have a problem when they ignore little things like cost, and the state of current technology.
Even if a cheap, new propulsion system was discovered that could, shall we say, subvert the laws of physics, these writers still ignore the massive cost of building and maintaining space-craft, which isn't cheap. Too many sci-fi writers also forget that today, we already have quite advanced robots and AIs which are used extensively. Why those writers think these things would disappear or would somehow have stagnated a hundred, five hundred, a thousand years into the future is a never-ending mystery to me.
This was my biggest problem with the beginning of this novel. It's set in the asteroid belt, which is a disc of space rubble that exists between Mars and Jupiter. It does not represent an exploded planet or even a planet which failed to form due to Jupiter's massive gravity. There isn't anywhere near enough material there to actually form a planet. It's just rubble, and to suggest that mining it is a viable option is to be extremely ignorant and short-sighted, especially if your idea of mining is to send human families out there to live and work on the asteroids, which is the premise here.
If the entire entire asteroid belt was put together it would represent only about 4% of the mass of the Moon, and half of this is the four largest asteroids: Ceres, Hygiea, Pallas, and Vesta. The rest is tiny, and mostly consists of carbonaceous and silicate asteroids, which no one would be interested in mining even if it were practical. Only about 10% of the asteroid belt is composed of what are known as M-types, or metal-rich bodies, and most of what they have to offer is copper, iron, or nickel. Iron is the single most common element on Earth, which also sports over one hundred million tons of nickel in ores, and almost two billion tons of copper. Why would anyone invest billions going to the asteroid belt which is farther away than Mars or Venus, when we have those metals in such abundance right here on Earth? And to what use would they be put? None of this is addressed in this novel.
It would not be economically viable, and even if we were to do it, it wouldn't be done by sending families out there with mining claims like this is the California gold rush! It would be done by robots and drones. If humans were needed, then those robots would go get the asteroids and deliver them to Earth orbit where humans could get at them far more cheaply and safely. That aside, this novel was so engrossing that I was willing to overlook these conceits for the sake of getting a good story, and a good story is what I got.
The novel centers around Liam, a 'spacer' (that is someone who has grown up in the asteroid colony), who lives with his mom, and his dad who is mining his 'claim' trying to make a living out of the asteroids. Just when they seem to have turned a corner and hit a rich 'seam', pirates attack the colony, and it’s through the inventive and brave actions of Liam and his best friends Nick and Tabitha, that the colony is saved, but it comes at the cost of losing the family's big score, and at the personal cost of Liam losing a foot. Kudos to the author for introducing a handicapped hero. You don’t see that often enough, and it's to be commended.
Liam has a thing for Tabitha, but she's leaving for the "navy" and so it’s too late for anything to bloom. I found this odd, because Tabitha also has a thing for Liam, yet she sat back and wasted all their time together neither telling him nor pursuing him, and now she's trying to blame him for the fact that they never got together? Genderism much?! I did not like that approach, but Tabitha effectively exits the story from that point onwards, and she wasn't missed - not by me anyway. I really saw no point in having her in the story to begin with. Not every story needs romance.
On the positive side for Liam, he and Nick managed to claim as a "prize", a craft which the fleeing pirates left behind. They decide that they want to clean it up and refit it, and they take-up an offer of assistance from one of the navy commanders, who supports them in their bid to become privateers, as a way to get back at the pirates and as a way to help out the navy. I have to say that having a navy is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, too.
I liked a few of David Weber's Honor Harrington series of novels, the second one in particular, but his descriptions of massive navy ships and of the pitched space battles were laughable. Weber treated 3D space like it was 2D water, and wrote his battles accordingly, and it made zero sense. Neither did it make sense that they would build insanely massive battle ships and play by oceanic rules in space. Even today, battleships are gone because they cannot cope with modern warfare. We have drones that can pop out of nowhere and destroy targets on a whim. The Star Wars movies suffered from these same flaws (but at least they had robots, unlike Star Trek!), so I have to say I wasn't impressed by the 'navy' idea or by the massive battle ships, which are just easier targets to be hit by very small drones - which would be extremely hard to detect, much cheaper to build, much more maneuverable, and much faster than any massive battleship could ever be.
But I digress! Liam and Nick's shady lawyer helps them get set up, and it seems pretty obvious he's not all above-board, which makes me wonder how it was that these two guys didn’t see the bad guy coming as soon as I did - especially since I'm more-often-than-not a bit slow in figuring these things out! I saw this one coming from way off, though.
So Liam and Nick gather together a cargo to transport to a nearby asteroid colony, and they get into trouble, since the asteroid is a pirate hang-out, but in process of completing their delivery, they come across Marney, an ex marine who's now working security for the asteroid. Once again kudos to the author for introducing a majorly kick-ass female character who is not your usual female. Marney isn't a runway model in disguise. Far from it. She is a real, everyday person, and this is what really endeared me to her and put her immediately into my top-ten best female characters. She also single-handedly kicked this novel up another notch in my esteem. Yes, esteem! Deal with it!
So I was really thrilled to read this, impressed both by the writing, and with the way the story played out, and I’ll be looking for the sequels to this one: Fool Me Once, and Parley. I recommend this novel.
