Alligator Alley by Mike Lawson

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on February 7, 2023

Joe DeMarco is not the leading character in this Joe DeMarco novel. DeMarco is the “fixer” for John Maroney, a corrupt congressman, but only a small part of the story follows DeMarco as he does his job. With relative ease, DeMarco sniffs out the reason why a defecting Democrat voted against an environmental bill that Maroney supported.

Maroney and everyone in Washington respects Henry Cantor, an employee of the Inspector General’s Office who is in charge of Department of Justice oversight. Cantor sent one of his bright new underlings to look into the abysmal job performance of two FBI agents in Florida. The employee, Andie Moore, is murdered in a swamp. Cantor suspects she was murdered by the two agents.

Cantor knows that DeMarco and a woman named Emma solved the murder of a congressman, a story that was told in House Arrest. Emma, retired from the Defense Intelligence Agency, did most of the work after DeMarco was arrested and accused of the murder. Cantor would like Maroney to ask Emma to team up with DeMarco to solve Andie’s murder. Maroney agrees despite the mutual animosity between Maroney and Emma.

Alligator Alley isn’t a whodunit as the reader knows from the beginning that the FBI agents did, in fact, kill Andi just after they murdered a crooked doctor they were extorting. Another party was involved in the extortion, one who was much brighter than the FBI agents. Emma spends much of the novel figuring out how to prove that the agents are guilty and identifying their accomplice. DeMarco tags along but, as in House Arrest, leaves the thinking to Emma. DeMarco would rather be playing golf anyway.

Alligator Alley is another of Mike Lawson’s fun, easy reads. Lawson sets up a surprise ending but telegraphs the outcome. Other novels and at least one movie have ended in the same way, making the outcome easy to guess. The resolution is fitting even if it isn’t surprising. Recent DeMarco novels have all been entertaining beach reads. This one is no exception.

RECOMMENDED

Critical Mass by Daniel Suarez

Published by Dutton on January 31, 2023

Combine a geopolitical thriller with a science fiction novel that extends geopolitics into space and you get an astropolitical sf thriller. Critical Mass (a sequel to Delta-v) captures the spirit of adventure and exploration while providing a roadmap to futuristic solutions to humanity’s most pressing problems. Political and ideological strife (not to mention greed) would likely make the roadmap impossible to follow, but it’s good to imagine a better future when disaster looms.

As the novel opens, Adedayo Adisa and Isabel Abarca are on the Konstantin, a ship that is orbiting the asteroid Ryugu. They have been mining the asteroid and sending automated tugs full of minerals back toward Earth’s moon, but the ship is breaking down. The main engines cannot be engaged. Some of the crew have died. To avoid depleting food supplies, three crew members volunteer for a desperate attempt to return to Earth on a spacecraft that wasn’t designed for Earth reentry. Skilled or lucky piloting sends the craft into Earth orbit, where it is promptly claimed by China.

The three returning crew members — Jin Hua Han, James Tighe, and Pria Chindarkar — spend the first part of the novel trying to convince Earth’s nations and private enterprises to build another rocket to rescue Adisa and Abarca. Soon after they departed the Konstantin, however, the ship was boarded by North Koreans. Communications were cut and nobody knows whether anyone is still alive on the Konstantin. The three are nevertheless resolved to find a way back to Ryugu when its orbit next brings it within a reasonable distance from Earth.

Political issues dominate the early chapters. Following the startup model of Uber, Nathan Joyce built the Konstantin and sent it on its mining mission without asking for permission. Joyce’s company theoretically owns the minerals that were launched into a lunar orbit from the Konstantin, but the company is now owned by its creditors. A clever lawyer comes up with a new quasi-legal scheme to operate a business as if it were an unregulated offshore business by operating it off-Earth.

The scheme is too complicated to describe here but if Uber worked, it seems to me Daniel Suarez’s model for off-Earth enterprises might be plausible. It certainly wouldn’t surprise me to see someone try it. The key to attracting investors is the creation of new cryptocurrency that will be backed by resources in space. Everyone knows that governments haven’t been able to regulate cryptocurrencies; that’s why they exist when dollar bills are easier to understand. And a cryptocurrency backed by goods and services has got to be better than a cryptocurrency backed by dream dust.

Most of the novel is devoted to the construction of a space station in orbit around the moon’s L2 Lagrange point. “Hard” science fiction is dedicated to making sure that plots are scientifically plausible and often feature characters who “science the shit” out of problems as they devise solutions. Critical Mass is devoted to engineering more than science. It turns out that it isn’t easy to build a space station, although it certainly helps to have tons of raw materials in lunar orbit. After building a shell, the next step is to build a mass driver on the moon, so that regolith can be mined and shot into orbit where it can be refined into essential materials.

Apart from tackling engineering, economics, and politics, Critical Mass offers a complex solution to global warming. Part of the solution allows ordinary people to remove carbon from Earth’s atmosphere in exchange for the new cryptocurrency. Part of the solution involves solar collectors that beam energy to the Earth’s surface, reducing the demand for fossil fuels. All these ideas depend on mining asteroids or the moon for materials needed to build the space station rather than transporting them from the Earth, but as the novel demonstrates, governments will likely oppose private ownership of a space station that they can’t devote to their own selfish purposes. Again, the solution lies in the questionable practice of asking forgiveness rather than permission. Heinlein would have loved this novel.

Before she goes to Ryugo, Isabel Abarca proclaims that “unless we test our limits, we will never know what we are capable of.” That was a common theme in classic science fiction novels before readers and writers grew jaded. Another reason why Heinlein would have enjoyed Critical Mass.

For a book that details innovative (if unlikely) solutions to existential problems, Critical Mass doesn’t feel expository. The explanations come from briefings and conversations that integrate well into the plot. Suarez imparts a ton of information while avoiding science lectures. He seasons the novel with tense moments (space isn’t a safe place, even for occupants of a space station). Characterization was clearly not Suarez's priorty, but stock characters serve their required purposes. The story moves quickly and creates the excitement of a thriller without dulling the reader’s mind with shootouts and fistfights.

Critical Mass is good read for fans of older science fiction. The novel is a throwback to the days when the word “science” in science fiction actually mattered. It combines traditional themes of human ingenuity with modern fears of environmental catastrophe and governments that will never cooperate to solve world-spanning problems.

RECOMMENDED

Children of Memory by Adrian Tchiakovsky

First published in Great Britain in 2022; published by Orbit on January 31, 2023

Children of Memory is the third book in a trilogy. While the books are connected by a shared history and a few characters, they tell independent stories. It isn’t necessary to read the first two novels to enjoy the third.

After a very long journey from Earth, a ship full of sleeping humans arrive at Imir. The ship is on its last legs. Some of the pods in which humans sleep are ruined, but most passengers are still alive. Unfortunately, the terraforming seeds that were planted on Imir long ago have only barely taken root. The planet has no predators because it has no life at all, apart from the primitive algae and such that the terraformers seeded. Imir might sustain a small settlement that works hard to grow the right crops and breed the right animals, but it won’t sustain the thousands on the ship.

All but a handful of settlers are left in orbit in the hope that they can one day be brought to the surface. That hope dims when the landers that operate between the surface and the orbiting ship break down. The survivors who make it to the planet must live with the guilt of leaving so many behind.

That’s a great concept for a story, but it’s only one part of Children of Memory. Before they travel to the surface, the colonists detect a radio signal. They pinpoint its origin and decide to build their settlement nearby, but they are too busy with the struggle for survival to investigate it. When they finally establish a foothold, the captain goes into the hills to find the signal’s source. What happens to him? Three hundred years later, nobody is quite sure.

In an earlier novel, a terraforming project gone wrong caused spiders with uplifted intelligence to evolve on another planet. The uploaded mind of the woman behind the terraforming (Avrana Kern) and one of the spiders, as well as a pair of birds and additional aliens that appeared in the second novel, make their way to Imir on a grand tour of planets that were seeded with life. What they find on Imir is puzzling.

A woman named Miranda, who thinks of herself as human but is something more than that, is dispatched to investigate. She plays the role of a teacher and befriends a young girl named Liff, who somehow remembers witnessing the entire history of the planet, including events that occurred long before she was born.

Miranda realizes that the colony is falling apart. Crops are failing, animals are not reproducing, machinery has broken down. She wants desperately to help while the colonists, wary of outsiders who have suddenly appeared, don’t trust her. A mythology of “others” has evolved during the colony’s brief existence. In tough times, it is always good to blame your problems on others. Perhaps the others managed to escape from the orbiting ship and set up a competing civilization. Perhaps the other are indigenous. Miranda claims to be from an outlying farm but she’s the only obvious evidence that “others” exist. She’s in danger of being lynched because lynching “others” is what humans do. The society’s development of an “us versus them” mindset, even in the absence of a “them,” is a smart take on human nature.

After some time passes, Kern loses track of Miranda. She sends the birds to find her. The birds excel at solving puzzles but are baffled by what they find. Nothing on Imir is what it seems to be. Liff thinks Kern is a witch but the truth is more complicated.

The story jumps around in time. That’s a common literary trick, but here the shifting time frames have a larger purpose. They make sense in the overall context of the story for reasons that won’t be revealed until the novel nears its end. A shift back to the day the colonists first landed on Imir, told in one of the novel’s concluding chapters, provides a satisfying view of events from the reader’s new perspective. Mastery of plot development and storytelling is one of the reasons I keep coming back to Adrian Tchaikovsky.

The story’s most poignant moments surround the choice to leave thousands in suspended animation so that a relative handful have a chance to survive. A later decision to allow couples to reproduce taxes the colony’s limited resources, making it even harder to justify bringing more people down to the planet’s surface. I enjoyed thinking about the moral uncertainties of such difficult choices.

Scenes of pioneering, while abbreviated, give a sense of how difficult it would be to sustain life on a planet that has never supported life. Intermittent debates about the differences between instinct and intelligence, body and mind, sentience and artificial intelligence, simulation and reality, add the philosophical depth at which Tchiakovsky excels. Science fiction is a perfect showcase for such debates, and these are both intriguing and relevant to the plot.

RECOMMENDED

After Many a Summer by Tim Powers

Published in spring 2023 by Subterranean Press

Subterranean publishes nice print editions of old and new works by established writers in the fields of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. This novella will be available in a trade edition, but the more expensive limited and lettered editions include full-color endsheets. Here’s a glimpse:

As this novella begins, an unsuccessful screenwriter named Conrad is pretending to be a homeless drunk who has staked out a spot near a 7-11 parking lot. Conrad, who has some real life experience with homelessness and alcoholism, has accepted a studio’s offer to purchase and produce his screenplay if, in exchange, he takes a car from the 7-11 parking lot and transports a package in the trunk to a stated location. He’s supposed to change cars a couple of times along the way.

Conrad assumes that the package he’s delivering is some sort of ransom. Horror fans know that the cardinal rule in situations like this is don’t open the package. Horror fans also know that the story won’t get started until the protagonist opens the package.

Curiosity gets the best of Conrad before he arrives at his final destination. He discovers that the package contains a shrunken head attached to a stick. He presses a button on the stick and the head asks, “Pray thee sir, whose dog are you?” Other than asking Conrad to kill him, the head’s conversation doesn’t always make much sense.

The head is some sort of oracle. It calls itself Tithonus. In Greek mythology, Tithonus begged the gods for immortality and was granted his wish, but never stopped aging, making immortality a miserable state of existence. Tithonus is also the title of a Tennyson poem from which the title of the novella is drawn. Readers of Greek mythology, Tennyson, and horror fiction all know that immortality is a curse. That’s particularly true when you’re living your life as a shrunken head on the end of a stick.

The hostage victim explains the oracle’s powers and how her family acquired it, but as readers of such stories know, nothing good ever comes from learning the future from a shrunken head. Conrad’s adventure takes him through a series of repeating, time-distorted events. He saves the woman who is being held hostage, unless she dies. He shoots a man, unless he doesn’t. Life is confusing when you’re unstuck in time.

Tim Powers has a long history of writing entertaining stories that often feature supernatural themes. The novella shares some of the flavor and time travel themes of his most celebrated novel, The Anubis Gates. Still, this is a less substantial work. After Many a Summer lacks the detail, careful characterizations, and surprises of Powers’ longer fiction. Having said that, the story is fast and fun, a good way to kill an evening for readers who want to read something spooky and unchallenging.

RECOMMENDED

The Drift by C.J. Tudor

Published by Ballantine Books on January 31, 2023

Following too many years of zombie novels, pandemic novels seem to be the new thing. After experiencing the reality of a pandemic, I suppose readers want to be comforted by reading about how it could be so much worse. Pandemics that kill almost everyone would meet that desire, but what about a pandemic that produces zombies? The Drift has a little something for every fan of trash fiction.

A world-ending virus is killing most people it affects, although a small percentage survive as Whistlers. Whistlers aren’t exactly zombies, but they are not entirely unlike zombies. The ones infected with the Choler variant are mindlessly violent like zombies, but they don’t shamble or eat brains. At least, they don’t appear to do so. The Whistlers are never developed in enough detail to make their nature clear, although it’s clear that living as a Whistler would not be a lifestyle of choice.

Blood plasma from infected people can be used to manufacture a vaccine that confers short-term immunity, so naturally infected people are kept alive and imprisoned so their blood plasma can be harvested for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful. One place where harvesting occurs is called the Retreat. It’s on a mountaintop. If there were ever good intentions underlying the Retreat, they have given way to producing the vaccine for a criminal organization that supplies it to wealthy people. The criminals presumably immunize themselves so they don’t get sick and die like everyone else, but the benefit they receive from wealthy people in a world that is filling up with dead people and Whistlers is one of many gaps in logic that the novel doesn’t seriously address.

Part of the novel follows characters at the Retreat who are dealing with the theft of plasma and the disappearance of workers. Whistlers are kept locked in the basement as involuntary plasma donors. But if the power goes out for longer than eight seconds, the cells automatically unlock. It took a special kind of sub-genius to devise that system. It will be no surprise to learn that the power fails.

Two other plot threads involve the dumbest young people you would ever hope not to meet. A dozen students at Invicta Academy are being evacuated on a bus that slides off the road and crashes during a blizzard. One of the bus passengers is pregnant and about to deliver because of course she is.

The Academy was just a private school for rich kids until the Department chose it as the location for a research center headed by a leading virologist. (The Department’s full name results in the acronym DRIFT because the world thrives on stupid acronyms.) Did the Department choose to turn a private school into a research center because no research centers were already set up and ready to go? Really? What happened to the CDC in Atlanta?

In any event, one of the kids on the bus is the daughter of the ruthless virologist who runs the Department. “Ruthless” because he wants to kill everyone who becomes infected, meaning pretty much everyone, including his daughter (or so she fears).

Anyway, after the bus crashes the emergency exit won’t open, probably because it was sabotaged by the bus driver who somehow disappeared unless he’s now pretending to be one of the bus passengers. Seriously, none of the passengers looked at the driver before the bus crashed? I guess private school students can’t be bothered to look at the bus driver.

A student hits upon the brilliant idea of pulling the toilet out of the bus and escaping through the hole they imagine they might find. Now, if you can remove the toilet, why not use it to break a window on side of the bus that isn’t buried in snow and get out that way? They complain that they don't have a hammer to break the window but the thought of using a steel toilet as a battering ram never occurs to them.

But wait, a passenger has already tunneled through the snow from a broken window in the side of the bus that is buried. The tunnel was necessary to search for a bomb in the luggage compartment (the passengers miraculously deduce that the bomb exists and know when it will explode based solely on intuition) but they decide they can’t rebuild the tunnel after it collapses because, well, that would be almost as easy as breaking another window. Besides, there are wolves outside and maybe Whistlers and it’s just so darn cold so maybe it would be better to stay inside the bus. Until the Department hit squad shows up to spoil that idea with machine guns. Good grief.

Another group of young people are stranded on a cable car that, while climbing the mountain to the Retreat, stops after the haul cable breaks. The young people don’t remember getting on the cable car. Escaping from a cable car without plummeting to the ground is more challenging than disembarking from a bus, so the cable car passengers busy themselves with killing each other. That task becomes easier when one of them finds a hidden weapon. There’s a whole story to how the weapon came be hidden but it makes just as much sense as the rest of the novel, meaning it doesn’t make much sense at all.

Some of the people in each group might be infected so they might as well sit back and die in peace. Instead, the passengers in both conveyances spend an inordinate amount of time discussing their predicaments and blaming each other while devising worthless plans. Frankly, I was rooting for hit teams to do away with all these whiny idiots. They make the same snarky comments (“Excuse me, I forgot to pack my screwdriver”) over and over while doing little in the way of cooperative problem-solving.

The needlessly convoluted plot eventually connects the kids on the bus to the kids on the cable car, relying on false identities and a late information dump to produces surprises that are too silly to shock. A mawkish moment near the story’s end produced no tears but it did make my eyes roll. The best thing I can say about The Drift is that many characters die before the novel ends. Good riddance to them.

NOT RECOMMENDED