Author: Rachel Bach aka Aaron
Publisher: Orbit Books
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review.
There's evidently a sequel to this novel due out next year, titled Honor's Knight. I don’t know if the author has heard of David Weber or not, but this particular choice of title has serious dumbfoundation potential! Note also that there's a fortune's pawn website, but it has nothing to do with this novel afaik.
The plot driver here is that a female protagonist with the highly unlikely (and unlikeable - I didn't like it, anyway) name of Deviana Morris wants to join the "Devastators", an upscale 'armor unit' on Paradox, which is her home world, and which is ruled by a monarch! They only recruit people who are past their prime for this unit, for reasons unknown, which is Deviana's main problem. I don’t get the monarchy thing. How did that happen? Did the first guy to arrive on Paradox declare himself king? Or did the populace elect one at some point?! If so, why? And why is Deviana so blindly loyal to this king? No explanations are offered.
You know, the more I think about this, the more I can see parallels between this novel and David Weber's space opera about Honor Harrington, the first volume of which I reviewed recently. They are both not from the main planet (Harrington not from Manticore, Deviana not from Earth). In both stories Earth is a republic, and the local planet a monarchy. They're both sword-fighters of some note. They're both insanely gifted and never wrong, etc., etc. I've seen Deviana described as a cross between Ellen Ripley of the Alien film series, and Kara Thrace of the Battlestar Galactica miniseries, but Deviana is no Ellen Ripley, not even close. Thrace, maybe, but then I never liked Thrace! I find a better comparison is with Molly Millions in Neuromancer, but Deviana is nowhere near as cool, competent, or as intriguing as she was, and either Ellen or Molly would kick Deviana's ass in a straight fight!
Anyway, in order to get there (the king's horses and men) from here, she has to quit the military and sign-up for a year on a trashy spacecraft named Glorious Fool, which is supposedly so rough that her duty there counts extra and will get her noticed for the aging, non-republican guard (she hopes). Can anyone smell 'series' in the air with Deviana not ever leaving Glorious Fool? Either that or she succeeds beyond her wildest hopes and then we get a GI Jane or a Private Benjamin in space when she joins the so-called devastators. Neither is appealing to me after reading this overture. I was hoping, when I read of there being a "Devi" in this novel, that I was going to be reading a story featuring an Indian protagonist. I still have no real take on her ethnicity, but it appears not to be Indian; with the name, she's more likely to hail from central Virginia!
I have to say I have no respect for writers who publish under different names. I don't know why they do it, nor do I care. It confuses things and makes life harder than it needs to be. I know it's their choice, but I sure don't have to respect it. However, Rachel Aaron was kind enough to comment on this (yes! that's how important I am now!), so I include her comment here, unabridged:
Hello Ian, I hate to butt in, but I felt the need to point out that the name change was my publisher's idea, and not mine. Indeed, most authors who change their names do so at the behest of their publisher for a whole myriad of different reasons, mostly having to do with sales. That said, I hope you won't hold the name change against me or the work. It really not delusions of grandeur, I swear!
Don't let them thar publishers be hesting you, y'all! And no, you're not butting in; you're most welcome to comment. This is a review of the novel, not of the author, although I admit that writing is such a personal thing that it's hard to distinguish between the two at times. I have to say though this merely reinforces what I've said elsewhere about self-publishing. I know there are some substantial advantages for those few who are allowed to travel the hallowed traditional route, but there are also costs as Rachel found out (yes, we're on first name terms now! Eeek. Yes we are - go read the quote above! That was a pretty slick trick by Rachel, because now I have to be nice!).
Unfortunately, I still haven't done quibbling, so here goes. Anyone who has read much of this blog can be in no doubt about my lack of respect for prologues!! Fortunately, Rachel spares us that. She does not, however, spare us first person PoV, which I really do not like, but which I will grudgingly put up with if the story is good enough. All that, plus my having just got through a couple of crappy ebooks, means that Rachel has it all stacked against her here, and she didn't do too well either.
In very broad and general terms, I found myself liking this story (it's amusing me, if nothing else!), but I do have a gaggle of gripes to get out of my system, so let’s address that now. Fortune's Pawn (I want to write a novel now and title it 'Fortune Spawn' just to make it really weird when people try to buy my novel or Rachel's! Yes, I'm evil that way! Then I can have a series: Fortune Prawn, Fortune Dawn, Fortune Morn, Fortune Lawn...you get the idea.)...now where was I? Oh yes, Fortune's Pawn is un-fortune-ately spawning more than its fair share of cliché and anachronism, it would seem. Despite this story taking place a thousand years into our future, Deviana takes a cab to the docks. A millennium from now we’re still hailing cabs and they still have crazy drivers? No one flagged down a cab a thousand years ago; why would we expect to be traveling in them a thousand years hence? I'm just asking!
But this is a problem with removing your novel some distance in time from our comfort zone (and I launch into this advisedly, for I have some things to say about this novel and space and time shortly!). Geoffrey Chaucer could have, in no way or flight of fancy ever have envisioned a cell phone, the Internet, a microwave oven, or a taxi cab sporting an infernal combustion engine and he's the better part of a thousand years aft of us! So how are we, as writers, to talk about life a thousand years from now and hope to make it sound both plausible and different?
Well, you pays your money (or your Republican Credits) and you takes your chance, I guess; then we as readers have to decide if we can stand to read it! But I would advise trying for something much further out there than we get in this novel if you're going to push for a thousand years hence! Something like Greg Bear delivers in The Way trilogy would do. If you're going to write like it takes place today (as this one does), but with a few techno-perks to leaven it, then it would seem far wiser not to push it so far into the future! Why she chose to go that route, I don't know. Hey, we're on first name terms, not on sharing your little secrets terms! Not yet anyway! But if she's smart, Rachel will make me a beta reader for her next volume in this series, and in return, I'll give her a better novel!
All the traditional sci-fi terminology is employed here, and in some ways that's a reassuring thing, I think, to big fans of the genre, but to me it really isn't. As character CJ declared in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin a cliché to me is like a red rag to a bull. But then bulls are red-green color blind, so we all know how useless that cliché is! But it bothers me that Earth isn’t called Earth (it's Terra), and people from Earth are 'Terrans'. That kind of thing makes me gag, and not in a good way, because it's never happened. In four billion years, no one outside of sci-fi has ever called planet Earth 'Terra' Okay, the Romans, but what have they ever done for us?! Actually the Romans used the word 'mundus' for the world, and terra for 'land', and even they never called its human population 'Terrans'!
Rachel has huge 'space trawlers' flying around, but my immediate question on reading that was "What do they trawl for in the vacuum of space?" If they're not literally trawling for anything, why call them trawlers instead of, say, freighters or something else? Maybe they trawl for lelgis? More anon on that slippery topic. And don’t even get me started on the utter absurdity of interstellar trading. I addressed this in my review of On Basilisk Station. I was unimpressed by these features of this novel (including the fact that they still use 2-D bar-codes a thousand years from now!). It’s also disturbing to learn that we're reduced to still using ice packs to treat a black-eye a thousand years from now, and evidently, there's no aspirin! I'm wondering why Deviana's enormously expensive gruntware can’t take care of minor injuries, and why it almost kills her when it chooses to take care of her more serious injuries!
There was another weird bit about mining asteroids. Mining for what? We're not told! And they're doing it in dangerous proximity to hostile alien territory, too. I don't get the why: why humans are doing the mining, and not robots (more on robots anon)? Rachel does admit to androids being in use, but none appeared in the first half of this novel. So, back to the asteroids: these things only appear in a solar system, so I don't get this trip to a location which is apparently out in the middle of interstellar space! Unlike in Star Wars and other such space operas, asteroid fields don't just appear out of nowhere. They're formed where planets are also formed, so why not mine them locally in the Paradox system or in Earth's solar system? Or if they must have these asteroids, why aren't they bringing the them into a high planetary orbit and mining there? There was already, in 2012, a movement to do precisely this!
Now to stage an unprovoked assault on the main character! Deviana is 27 and she's inevitably the best at what she does, of course, because, "Hello! This is the hero!". I am wondering if I've had a whiff of Kris Longknife here or perhaps more accurately, Kylara Vatta, as well as Honor Harrington? After finishing this novel I have to say that I found all three of those characters much more appealing than Deviana Morris.
This part was interesting to me, because why she wants that end goal so badly is neither explained nor justified as far as I can see. In the absence of a motive, I can only put it down to juvenile machismo. But what I really don't see here is a justification for an army to begin with, and I can see even less justification for a monarch to have his own private elite army. Just who, exactly, are these troops fighting? Not space baddies, that's for sure, because there's unabated piracy galore going on. And what do the 'Devastators" devastate, precisely? What is the nature of the threat to the king from which this unit offers such skilled protection? Paradox is not a planet of diverse political complexion. There are no individual nations at war. It's about as homogeneous as it can get from what I've read so far, so why the military? What does it do and how effective is it across thousands of light years of empty space?
Deviana succeeds in getting hired on as one half of ship security in about five minutes, and is told by the captain to report to Basil. Despite being explicitly told that "He's my second and you'll obey him…", Deviana is evidently not very smart because as soon as she meets Basil, who is an alien (of a rather avian race known as aeons) she tries to determine what gender he is! Which part of 'he' and 'him' did you not get Deviana?! Oh, and there's also a humanoid, intelligent, predatory reptile, lest I forget the ship's doctor. In fact, there are four 'races' so far known in the universe: humans, aeons, xith'cal, and lelgis. I was forced to surmise, since we've had mammal, reptile, and bird, that the latter must either be fish or amphibian, but it turned out to be jellyfish, which is neither! Shows what I know!
On a related note, I wish the sci-fi community would do a better job of dealing with the fact of evolution. This 'bird', for example, is the navigator, yet has wings, of course - nary a hand or fingers in sight. How does that work exactly? Some birds on Earth, most notably the Corvidae (such as Ravens for example), and the Psittacidae (such as African Grey parrots, for example), have shown themselves to be exceptionally smart, but despite this, the human lineage is the only one in some four billion years of evolution on Earth which has produced our level of achievement and intelligence (for what that's worth! Ahem!).
Organisms don’t plan to evolve. There is no 'goal'. There is no scheme, or design, or path of 'progression' All that evolution is, bottom line, is a sieve, which blindly "selects" those organisms which are best equipped to survive in a given set of circumstances. Everything else pretty much becomes extinct. If an organism is doing great in its niche, there's no pressure or 'desire' to change. There is always potential to change, but that doesn't mean it will be tapped. Every organism alive on Earth right now is just as 'advanced' - just as 'evolved' - as we humans are. They're not any more evolved for our niche than we are for theirs is all. They are more or less adequately evolved for their own niche.
Birds are specialized for a certain set of circumstances, and they've exploited that admirably (though not consciously). But they did not evolve to manipulate things with hands, as we did, and so they have no good aptitude for that kind of thing, although some of them try as best they can with what they do have, bless their little beaky schnozzes. So where was the impetus for the aeons to evolve a large brain and space travel if they had everything they needed in their own world, just as birds do in ours? Yes, I know that's precisely what we did, but we're far less specialized than birds are and far less tightly constrained by our evolution than they. But birds do not consciously navigate their way around the planet. They do not set out aboard ships and boats as sea-faring humans have done since they could. They do not plan and undertake exploratory trips for the hell of it. So why would organisms which have evolved for flight on a given planet be any better at navigation in space than humans or any other advanced species? To suggest that they are makes no sense.
The mammals took some seventy million years of evolution to produce humans, the only advanced intelligence ever to create a civilization (on this planet) as we have done. The dinosaurs had a quarter billion years and all they produced was those smart birds at the very end of it, so while not wanting to sound arrogant or prideful of what we are or where we came from, I don’t buy this uninventive and biologically insupportable sci-fi trope of simply taking a non-mammalian Earth species and pretending it’s a smart alien species without putting any thought whatsoever into how it came to be what it is. As if that wasn't bad enough alone, the specific aeon on this space-craft is racist (species-ist? class-ist?) enough to refer to Deviana as a "monkey". That kind of reference has definitely been wa-ay overused in fiction. OTOH, maybe it tells us something important about the kind of person Basil is!
About one third the way in, I decided that the more I read about Deviana the less I like her, not least for the fact that she's a psychotic killer barely keeping her blood-lust under wraps. And she's supposed to be some sort of hero to me? After a scene where she gets so prideful about her armor and skills that it’s almost sickening (especially when narrated in the first person, which is why I detest first person PoV) she then proceeds to get drunk as a skunk and almost literally throw herself at the ship's cook, the very one who's deliberately getting her drunk in the first place. I cannot credit either of these people with anything worthy.
The cook is not someone I would trust when he almost literally pours a bottle of whisky down Deviana's throat for no apparent reason other than to get her falling-down drunk. He doesn't take advantage of her even though she begs him too, but I didn't trust this guy at all (and amazingly, it turned out I was right not to do so!). The fact that Deviana is pretty much lying down with her legs open for him (figuratively speaking) at this point does nothing for me, but it goes a long way towards authenticating the disparaging slur which her security partner, Cotter, threw at her when they first met.
Deviana seems to me to be completely out of character in drinking so much that it’s physically harmful on the one hand, and then on the other to paradoxically pride herself in her training, her fitness, and her skills. She does hail from a planet called Paradox, and she's the kind of idiot who would use armor piercing ammunition and fire it from a gun on the bridge of a spaceship, so…. But these two Devianas do not connect at all for me. I would not trust her, nor would I want anything to do with a security guard with anger management issues, who's a "functional" alcoholic, and looking at serious health problems coming her way in the not-too-distant future, if she doesn’t have any already. That scene was neither cute nor appealing to me. It’s not smart. It’s not funny. It’s not attractive. It's not even interesting. And it sure as hell isn't remotely romantic!
Deviana knows nothing about this guy, yet she's desperate to get him into bed, and she's not even ovulating! I know this because she never does; apparently women a thousand years from now can get that turned off, since it's never mentioned in the entire novel...about a women...who's on-board a spaceship with several other women. That aside, Deviana's behavior merely makes her very shallow in my eyes, but what I really don’t get here is why a female author would create a leading character who is modeled so embarrassingly closely on the worst stereotypical aspects of a man? Such a character has nothing to offer me. If I wanted to read about a macho man I wouldn’t be reading this! Not that I find novels about macho men any more appealing than those about women who are way too much andro and not enough gynous.
Anyone who has followed this blog will know I have no problem with tough, feisty, hard-playing female characters, but those characters were treated respectfully by their authors, so I guess my real problem here is what is motivating Rachel to treat her best bet so shabbily - and for such poor reasons! It’s not like Deviana is an older woman, with a sad back-story (or a bad sack story - it’s not like she went through an awful relationship - not that we’ve been told anyway).
It’s not like she has some tragedy in her past which might explain her behavior now. On the contrary, she has a great guy who would do anything for her and she won't give him the time of lay unless it's on her own terms. She just uses him, so there is no love triangle there (although there is a love triangle - more anon!) But I just don't get making Deviana extra- super- ultra-tough, and then playing her like the most pathetic YA love-lorn teen imaginable in the so-called romance department. These two traits are painted so incompatibly that the jagged mis-join is like a bas-relief on every page.
It's like Rachel simply set out to make her main character in this series a man in the body of a woman, and that doesn’t work for me at all. I read novels about female characters because I'm interested in female characters, especially ones who are making their mark in their world one way or another. If I wanted to read about a transsexual, I’d get a novel about a transsexual! If I wanted to read about a man thinly disguised as a woman, I'd, er read this, I guess! But the truth is that I started this novel because I wanted to read about a woman, not about a woman who evidently wishes that she were the worst example of obnoxious male behavior she can be!
She has too many oddball quirks, too (aside from her berserker penchant) to be likable. She claims she buys only the best, but then panics when she sees someone drop her weapons onto a soft surface in case they get damaged! Huh? The weapons aren't tough after all? In another scene, she's seriously considering whether her best move is to run away - and no, she's not threatened or under fire at the time, she's merely behaving like a juvenile. I can't match that up with her vaunted skill and bravery as a soldier, but it does match her airhead teen behavior with Ruprecht. Maybe she's not a human, but a spineless lelgis?
But my biggest problem with Deviana, I think, after thinking some thoughtful thoughts, is that we never actually meet her. She's buried underneath her armor, she's hidden behind her boys with toys obsession-with/addiction-to weapons technology. She's shamed by this limp portrayal of her juvenile obsession with Ruprecht, and this means we never really find out anything about her at all. We get only the superficial, no depth allowed. That's really sad, because it means that once again, I'm finding supporting characters (in this case, Nova and Ren) far more interesting than the main one!
While we're on the topic of shallow, I notice that Fortune's pawn is yet another space opera without any robots. The problem of course, when robots are added to the recipe, is that writers seem to think that they can come only in three varieties: angst-ridden AIs, smart-ass side-kicks, or bloodless villains. Seriously? Can we not just have them as a part of life and be done with it? They’re part of life now; why would that change to the point where they’re effectively non-existent a millennium from now?
Having said that, I immediately saw that I was wrong about the robots! There are two robots here, and one of them is called Deviana Morris. I mean what else would she be, cocooned as she is in her automatic suit, which works even without her conscious control? So I have to ask why we would admire any of her skills as a soldier when her AI suit and her automated weapons really do all the work? Which brings me back to the love triangle. Deviana's love triangle is between her, Rupert the cook, and her armor and weapons. I hope the armor/weapons wins, because Ruprecht is even more sickening than they are.
Having said all that, and despite all that, the story still intrigued me and I finished it if only because I was curious to see what this bizarre recipe produced when it was cooked at 3 degrees Kelvin for a month and came out of the oven with frost subliming from it, but Rachel is making it much harder for me to like this novel than ever she ought! At one point, for example, she has Deviana loaning a weapon to the ship's cook when they're under attack from those space-faring ravenous predatory lizards (can you say 'Aliens'?!), and she expects him to break an arm using it, but doesn't warn him. He doesn't break an arm, so then she's all intrigued by the fact that he's not a complete dumb-ass and knows how to hold his arm so it's neither rigid nor lax and thereby protect himself! I have a hint for Deviana: look up Aikido some time when you're not strutting, preening, brooding, or nesting!
Deviana's weapons are problematical, too, as long as we’re talking advanced technology. She has a light saber of all things (and there's 'the force', but it's called 'plasmex' here)! This macho gun I mentioned, which she calls Sasha, supposedly has a kick like a mule. Other than pure machismo, why? I don’t mind having any given thing in a story if there's some rationale behind it, but to stuff things into the novel like it's an Xmas stocking for a spoiled, rich kid and offer nothing to support the inclusion is not going to make me a fan, especially when the corollary to this crude weapon design is the open admission that humans are technologically just as backward and limited a thousand years from now, as they are here and now!
So let's talk about time-travel, and space-time, and hyperspace jumps, because this is where the novel got more interesting for me (but unfortunately, it was never pursued!). Rachel made mention of the fact - and intriguingly it was just a mention - that a computer figures out the jump-math because otherwise, the ship might come out of hyperspace in the wrong place, or at the wrong time.... She also mentions that time can flow only forwards, which isn't actually true - not according to the laws of physics, but I'm thinking, why hasn't anyone is the world of this novel taken advantage of this? Why do they have to arrive at a "realistic" time? And why 7 hours in "hyperspace"? This is yet more info which is dumped, then neither pursued nor explained.
So when they deliver a load of fish to a pissant planet which seems to have more than its fair share of what Rachel calls earthquakes, but which are not on Earth, so are actually Mycantquakes, things started getting weird, I really perked up for the first time since I started reading this novel. Now why they're delivering dead fish at massive expense to an impoverished planet which cannot fail to have its own fish galore, for as wet as it is, is a question which has absolutely no sensible answer whatsoever. If they were delivering live fish for stocking the local waters, it would have potentially made a lot more sense, but they're not.
It's on their arrival here that they start noticing things going wrong with clocks, including Deviana's suit clock, which never goes wrong. After the captain goes off and then fails to return as arranged, Deviana takes off after him and runs into an attack from something both very powerful, and invisible to her suit's sensors! Now I was getting the story I'd been hoping for from the start, and I was hoping it would be worth the extraordinarily long wait! But it wasn't, because we got cheated out of any explanations for anything!
After battling the invisible giant shrimp in the forest clearing (which may or may not be tied in with the jellyfish lelgis), Deviana discovers that the electronic interference fried her video recording. She has back-up, but first let me ask you to recall that this is a thousand years into the future, and even here in lowly 2013 we can already record gigabytes of data onto a tiny USB drive; then consider that Rachel tells us the chip is too small to record voice data even though it has video. Ahem! But Deviana does learn of some weird stuff which took place whilst she was unconscious, and this is where the story started catching my interest - and where I stop putting out any more spoilers.
I think I've wa-ay overdone it for this novel. I don't usually go into so much detail about the Net Galley ebooks I get because I don't want to rob the writer of their story, but I haven't done such a deep look into a novel since I blogged David Weber's On Basilisk Station so I'm about due for another one. I may as well treat Rachel to it since she has shown a personal interest in my blog! (and how did she know I was blogging her novel?! Hmm!). Plus she has the sequel coming out soon, so it's not like this is a brand new novel.
I was just really disappointed that it took me reading some fifty percent of this novel before it turned up something that I really liked. Rachel is lucky I've been so tolerant of her peccadilloes, because normally I wouldn't get this far into a novel where I'd found so much to bitch about! She did have the courtesy to visit the blog, and I did say I would have to be nice - and I have tried! The rest of this review will be more vague and general with no more detailed peaks, so be warned!
It was encouraging in chapter eleven to learn that Rachel, unlike all-too-many sci-fi writers, is smart enough to know that a virus which has evolved to prey upon certain species on one planet is unlikely to be a threat to organisms from an entirely different planet, but let's not forget that biochemistry is still chemistry and that chemistry is universal, so I wouldn't flatly rule it out, as Rachel does. But kudos to her there. Having said that, let me put out a general alert to writers that the phrase is "another think coming" not "another thing coming" when we're writing sentences like: "if that's what [person X] thinks, then they have..."!
And what's with John Benton questioning Deviana and using five different pet phrases for her: 'dear', 'darling', 'Deviana', 'girl', and 'Miss Morris' all in the space of a handful of pages? This completely took my mind away from the exchange they were having to focus it entirely on how bad the dialog was! If Rachel was aiming to make me dislike Benton from his rambling speeches, she failed, as indeed she did if she were trying to emulate a Bond villain. I found I liked and trusted Benton far more than ever I've been able to like or trust Ruprecht or the murderous captain. I doubt that's what Rachel intended I should feel. Benton was certainly more honest with her than either of the other two guys have been, yet Dumb Devi spurns his offer and remains loyal to a captain who has repeatedly put her at risk, kept her in the dark about potential threats, and would have had her killed if he'd had his way. She's a mercenary for god's sakes, but instead of behaving like one, she behaves like an idiot.
I am now done with this, and having read every page (except the sickening pages where Ruprecht and Deviana suck (face) which I skipped happily, I have to report that I'm really disappointed. It turns out that Fortune's Pawn is really nothing more than a ~370 page prologue for an oncoming series, and as you know if you read this blog, I detest prologues. Actually if truth be told, I'm more saddened than disappointed, because this novel had some good and engaging ideas at its core, but the execution of those ideas was, well the death of them, as executions typically are!
One of the biggest problems is that quite literally nothing is resolved in this story (except that we get rid of the sad YA trope romance between Deviana and Ruprecht, but you and I know perfectly well that that is only temporary, and it's unfortunately only going to come roaring back in volume two. I will not come roaring back for volume two, because I have no intention of pursuing this series in search of answers, at least some of which we should have been given in volume one! I have no interest in reading any more about a character I neither like nor respect.
