Author: Mindee Arnett
Publisher: Harper Collins
Rating: WARTY!
Erratum:
p73 "The ITA are..." should be "The ITA is..."
I've seen some reviewers compare this to the Joss Whedon TV show Firefly and the subsequent movie Serenity both of which I review elsewhere on this blog, but this is no Firefly, not even close. What it comes closest to, IMO and experience, is Jack McDevitt's Alex Benedict series which I'll get around to reviewing at some point, but which is a far more engrossing and better-written series than ever this is.
Avalon is the name of the spacecraft which Jethro "Jeth" Seagrave covets and wants to recover. It once belonged to his parents, but after they were executed by the ITA (Interstellar Transport Authority) for treason, ownership fell to Jeth's uncle Milton, who promptly gambled it away. Why the ITA didn't confiscate the ship is unexplained, but now it's owned by a crime lord with the risible name of Hammer Dafoe who not at all coincidentally, is the "employer" of Jeth and his crew of teen thieves which includes Jeth's thirteen-year-old sister Lizzie, his friend Celeste (a strong female character who is sadly under-employed), and a couple of other guys: Flynn and Shady, who are basically nothing more than background decoration.
After a "meeting" with ITA agent Marcus Renford, whose appearance was as unexpected as it was inexplicable to them, the teen gang completes a successful theft of a spacecraft and manages a rag-tag get-away, delivering the ship to Hammer. He apprises Jeth of his next job, which curiously is precisely the job which Renford had told them it would be. They're to salvage a spacecraft named Donerail, which seems simple enough, but there's one catch: it's in the Belgrave quadrant, travel through which is forbidden by the ITA because it is so dangerous. The bizarrely unpredictable is the norm in Belgrave, we're told.
Jeth gets Hammer to agree, if he successfully completes this run, to pass ownership of the Avalon into his hands (not that he trusts him to do so). After talking his people into going on this scavenger hunt, Jeth and his ship and his crew set out for Belgrave. Interestingly, the normally imperturbable Celeste broke down and cried when he talked with her privately about this. The Belgrave was where her mother went missing - from right inside the spacecraft in which they were traveling.
I have to say up front that I always have issues with this kind of space story (where there's a federation of planets which are trading back and forth) because it betrays an ignorance of just how massively huge and impossibly impassible space truly is. There's a good reason why it's called 'space', and that's because endless space is precisely what it is, and almost entirely empty at that. The nearest solar system to ours is four light years away, which means that even if you could travel at the speed of light, which is impossible if you're any more massive than a photon, it would take a whole four years just to get there.
This is, of course, why sci-fi space travel authors indulge themselves in "hyper-drives" and "travel gates" and so on, vaguely alluding to unproven scientific concepts which, even if true, probably won't result in the kind of things which sci-fi writers routinely lure us into believing and accepting.
This novel employs both (drives and gates), so we can take a big step around this obstacle, but even if we grant that much, there's still the issue of trading. I can see how trading between planets might work for very expensive, very rare items where there is a wealthy clientele to purchase them, but transporting every day items like metals and food is nonsensical. The costs would be prohibitive, and there's no way you could transport enough food to to feed a whole planet's population!
Even if it were practical, humans would not be doing it. The ships would be robotic because humans are unreliable, dangerous, and extremely expensive to support in space. Robots, OTOH, which are becoming ever more ubiquitous in real life right here and now, are once again inexplicably absent from this novel. So, as with most sci-fi, you have to decide if the story is told well enough that you're willing to let all these huge plot holes get a bye, or whether it's bye-bye for this novel. For me it was the latter.
There's one more thing, which is - in the case of this novel - the ITA. This is supposed to be the sheriff in town, rigidly regulating the transit gates and drives, and keeping everyone in line, but this kind of regulation of necessity assumes a manageable territory. It completely ignores how unnervingly titanic space really is - and the fact that it's also 3D. Without very rapid (and very cheap) transportation from one planet to another, there's no way in hell such an authority could regulate and patrol the space competently and within any reasonable budget. And who would even pay for something like that? So again, it's another thing to which we must turn a blind eye if we;re to enjoy this novel. So the question you have to ask yourself is: how many blind eyes do I have to turn before I become nauseated from all this rapid spinning?!
When Jeth and his crew finally locate the Donerail, they discover three people aboard, none of whom were expected to be there, and certainly not alive, for as long as the ship has been missing. Vincent (who is so non-existent in this story as to beg the question why he was ever included in it in the first place), along with Sierra, conveniently the same age as Jeth, and a young girl named Cora who is roughly the same age as Lizzie. Sierra is impressive and represents a strong female character. Cora is a child, and it's really no spoiler to reveal that there's something unusual about her. There's always something unusual about a Cora (as I maintain in my own novel Saurus!).
These three people represent a complication for Jeth (who was ordered by Hammer not to board the Donerail) the size of which he hasn't even begun to appreciate yet, but he works out a plan to rescue them and still meet Hammer's expectations. It's around this point that Jeth also discovers a data crystal evidently recorded by his mother before she died, yet he inexplicably shows almost no interest in it. I honestly couldn't believe that an author would create a main character this stupid, flat and unimaginative! He's not even a decent captain, so this begs yet another question: how did he ever become the leader of this teen group? He's not credible
Jeth has missed his mother since his own childhood (evidently didn't care too much about dad, but that's the quiet burden dads bear: it's always about mom), she was killed after coming out of the Belgrave quadrant, which he is right then and there investigating; there's a data recording related to her time spent there; there's a mystery on the Donerail (what made those precisely bored holes, for example?). There are three people who thought they'd been lost for two weeks but who've been missing considerably longer that that; Jeth's own spacecraft seems to now be garnering for itself some of the same holes which the Donerail was riddled, and he has no interest in investigating his own mother's thoughts on the topic? Jeth is a moron.
Jeth is also dumb to trust Sierra, and she is stupid not to tell him certain things which would have benefited her to do so, so this felt like a huge mess of a badly written novel, quite frankly. The attraction between Jeth and Sierra is too much, too fast, and it has nothing realistic to trigger it, which coincidentally also applies to her betrayal of him and to their rapprochement.
There are other things which make zero sense. There's a form of legalized slavery going on here, whereby people like Hammer can control other humans by doing a bit of surgery and plugging a device into the back of the neck which renders the victim into one of two equally undesirable states: a complete drone, or a semi-autonomous drone. There was nothing offered to explain why such devices would be tolerated. I can see how it might come to be a punishment as an alternative to prison - a kind of work-release, but it still seemed way harsh and was all-but completely ungoverned.
There were far too many questions and far too few answers to boot. No doubt the author plans on continuing this as a series, but I do not plan on accompanying her. Things like the Belgrave quadrant itself, the movement of entire ships from one place to another with no travel in between, and the precisely bored holes through the Donerail were not explained. Instead they were glossed over, which was really dissatisfying. In short I can't recommend a novel that makes as many mistakes as this one does.
