Fortune's Pawn by Rachel Bach

Published by Orbit on November 5, 2013

Devi Morris has quit the Blackbirds (which sounds like a Brownie troop but is actually an elite group of mercenaries) and now she wants to serve the Sacred King as a Devastator, but she's only 27. Needing more experience, she takes a security position on Brian Caldswell's trading ship. Devi is from Paradox, a world of humans ruled by a monarchy that, for the most part, remains undescribed. Apart from the fact that Devi wears powered armor (a battle suit that is borrowed, without modification, from standard military sf) and flies around in a spaceship, I had no sense that she was living in the future or, for that matter, on a world other than Earth. She might as well have been one of Arthur's Knights (her co-worker cuts down enemies with an axe, and no I'm not kidding). The ship is equipped with canons (still not kidding) to ward off space pirates, so you can add seafaring sagas to the uninspired inspirations for Fortune's Pawn, as well as gladiator movies and romance novels. To the extent that the trappings of science fiction appear in this genre mishmash -- for instance, in a passage that explains how gates are used to travel through hyperspace, or its incorporation of "the Force" from Star Wars (and calling it plasmex) -- the trappings could have been written twenty years ago. It's all a bit stale.

The ship's doctor looks like a lizard because he belongs to one of the alien races that populate Hollywood movies and television shows. Of course, lizard races are always evil human-eaters and these aliens are no exception (except for the doctor, whose change of teams is not credibly explained). Is it possible to imagine an alien that doesn't look like a lizard? Yes, it's possible to imagine one that looks like Big Bird (that would be the ship's navigator) and an invisible alien predator with tentacles and aliens with a hive mind, but those have also been done before. (The glowing bugs that live in space might be aliens but they might be hallucinations -- or something else entirely -- so they don't really count.)

Fortune's Pawn is likely to appeal to fans of romance fiction more than it will to hardcore science fiction fans. Devi has the hots for Rupert, the ship's cook who is, of course, not what he appears to be (although he is a good cook). Rupert's true nature and that of another crew member, as well as the mysterious mission upon which Caldswell's ship has embarked, gives the plot more spark than the cheesy romantic entanglement between Devi and the dreamy cook. The action scenes are repetitive and are not improved by the names Devi has given her weapons ("Sasha was empty so I pulled out Mia").

Rachel Bach's prose is too dependent on cliché but she writes with good pace. The story held my interest in anticipation that the mysterious nature of various crew members would be revealed. That happens, to a degree, but as the first book in a series a good many questions are left unanswered. I suppose that's to be expected but it's rather unsatisfying, particularly since I'm not interested in reading the next one.

NOT RECOMMENDED