The Last Orphan by Gregg Hurwitz

Published by Minotaur Books on February 14, 2023

After an uncertain start, the Orphan X novels have followed an upward trending arc. Gregg Hurwitz continues that ascent in The Last Orphan.

The action begins when Evan Smoak visits the hospital where the woman who won his heart is receiving care. Despite taking precautions, Smoak is captured after a chase through hallways and stairways and streets and a parking ramp. His captor is Naomi Templeton of the Secret Service. Being captured, even by an elite team of counter-assault agents, makes Smoak wonder if he’s losing his edge, as does missing a small target from a distance of twenty feet, a shot that he is fully capable of making.

Smoak is on a sort of special parole, the terms of which he has repeatedly violated. Rather than sending him to Gitmo, Templeton puts him on a video call with the president, who wants a favor from Smoak — a favor he can trade for his freedom, albeit on a leash. Smoak, of course, will immediately slip the leash.

The favor involves finding and assassinating Luke Devine, a wealthy man who might be a psychopath but is certainly a narcissist. Devine is skilled at manipulating others to get what he wants. Deniable blackmail is one of his tools. The president believes Devine has become too powerful. Perhaps he is simply inconvenient. In any event, Smoak agrees to make his own assessment.

The story reunites Smoak and sixteen-year-old wunderkind Josephine Morales, who has been exploring her boundaries since the end of the last novel. He also gets an assist from Candy McClure. Both Jo and Candy are, like Smoak, former participants in the Orphan program that trained them in the art of killing.

The story features the usual blend of Jo’s computer hacking and Smoak’s exploits as an action hero. The plot becomes a bit deeper than controlled mayhem when Devine makes a credible case that the president has not ordered his assassination with clean hands. How Smoak will process that information sets up the novel’s resolution.

Smoak continues to develop as a character. Smoak alternately enjoys and is irritated by Jo’s teen snark, but she gets under his skin in ways that make him question his life. Smoak is anal and compulsive — traits that probably keep him alive — but his emotional limitations also limit his ability to connect with others. As he confronts the fury that drives his life, he begins to suspect that his hatred of feeling vulnerable is standing in the way of the openness to others that demands vulnerability.

The action scenes are on a par with Reacher and Gray Man novels — making the story fun to read and easy to visualize — but Smoak is developing a stronger personality than most other fictional tough guys. The novels are moving away from their unoriginal foundation — Jason Bourne meets the Equalizer — and are carving out a unique space in the action hero genre. Smoak’s continued evolution as a character makes the series a good choice for action hero fans.

RECOMMENDED

The Applicant by Nazli Koca

Published by Grove Press on February 14, 2023

The Applicant takes the form of Leyla's diary. Leyla believes that autobiographies are always embellished with fiction. Why not disguise her life as fiction, changing only the names of the innocent? Yet she wonders whether it is possible both to live and narrate a life without subjecting either the life or the narrative to censorship. If Leyla is censoring her life, she is at least letting the reader see the good parts.

The “my novel is my life” premise only works when lives are interesting or characters have something to say. Leyla has something to say about just how uninteresting her life is and how helpless she is to find productive ways to escape the drudgery. Oddly enough, the drudgery of her life turns out to be interesting.

Leyla’s life is filled with the drama of a young unattached woman who feels out of place. Leyla is from Turkey but she’s living in Berlin, making immigration — invisible borders and the arbitrary documents required to cross them — a prominent theme. Leyla needs funds to renew her student visa, but she can only do that if she wins her appeal after being kicked out of the university for writing a thesis that “wasn’t academic enough.” She also needs to hold a job to convince the German government that she can support herself legally.

There has recently been a coup in Turkey and Leyla doesn’t want to return to live under a dictatorship, but if she stays in Germany by claiming refugee status she won’t be able to go home to visit her family. Conversely, if she returns to Turkey — where her debt-ridden mother and sister are staying with her aunt — she will only qualify for a minimum wage job and will never save enough money to return to Germany.

The story addresses discrimination against Turks in Germany, particularly in academia. The professor who failed Leyla is notorious for passing every student without reading their shoddy theses, but he held Leyla to a higher standard.  She is bitter that she must be either “a perfect student or a poor refugee” to remain in the country. To be fair, however, Leyla was far from a perfect student.

Leyla wants to be a writer but doesn’t want to write “the kind of book that gets one’s family’s home raided by the police.” She earns a reputation by interviewing minor celebrities in front of small Berlin audiences but the celebrities take all the entrance fees. She parties and hangs out with Aria, an unpublished writer, and with Victor, her gay Cuban roommate, and with Mona, who defies description.

Leyla’s friend Defne suggested that Leyla replace her in the the job Defne was leaving at a hostel, but didn’t mention that it was a cleaning job. Leyla cleans by day, hoarding half-empty bottles of alcohol that guests leave behind, and by night visits clubs and gets messed up on alcohol, weed, and ketamine. She sleeps with guys at random.

Female sexuality is a central theme. Mona suggests that Leyla earn extra income as an escort, since she might as well be paid if she wants random sexual encounters. Leyla writes memories in her diary of working with Mona for a couple of months when she should have been focusing on her thesis. Having been exploited by men throughout her life, Leyla is astonished to learn how easy it is to take money from them.

Leyla considers the hypocrisy of men who regard sex and money as the ultimate prizes in life but make it illegal for women to have sex for money. She wonders why women are expected to earn their equality by beating men at their own game after centuries of providing domestic labor for free, when it is so much easier to change the rules and gain power through sex. At the same time, she comes to regard the commodification of her sexuality as socially paralyzing.

As Leyla is waiting for her visa status to resolve, she initiates a sexual encounter with a Swedish Volvo salesman who picks her up in a Berlin bar. When she visit him in Sweden, she tries to convince herself that she isn’t using him as she contemplates living a middle class, Ikea-furnished life. Maybe she even loves him, although she thought the same about Mona. Yet the Swede doesn’t share her liberal philosophy. He doesn’t read or think deeply. He is always calm while Leyla is a tight bundle of anxiety. Perhaps their personalities are too dissimilar to make a relationship work.

The novel’s limited drama lies in the choices Leyla must make. Should she marry the Swede? He’s handsome and attentive and kind. Her mother thinks a handsome Swede who has a job is a perfect choice. To live with the Swede, Leyla would need to abandon her “adventurous writer’s life,” perhaps losing the only material she can find that’s worth writing about. She would also need to live in Turkey while awaiting a Swedish residential visa. Yet her other choices — returning to school, finding a decent job that is consistent with her visa restrictions — are largely beyond her control. Perhaps a return to Turkey and a career writing advertising copy is her fate. She feels that she is on the verge of making a terrible mistake but does not know which choice will be the mistake. That’s life in a nutshell.

Late entries hint that Leyla might find at least modest success as a writer. Whether she will make the right choice about her life is up in the air. The ending has a coming of age moment — a realization that it’s time to grow up — that seems forced. Maybe a transition to maturity is expected in the story of a young person’s life, but Leyla’s life is interesting precisely because she’s not sufficiently mature to make good decisions. I liked Leyla because she put maturity on hold. It’s only when partying and a dead-end job get old that Leyla predictably decides to face reality. Okay, that’s nice, but predictable behavior doesn’t make for compelling fiction. Still, getting to know Leyla before she reaches her turning point is worth a reader’s time.

RECOMMENDED

Cold People by Tom Rob Smith

Published by Scribner on February 7, 2023

Cold People might best be regarded as a fantasy, or maybe as a thought experiment. Its implausible plot rules out caregorization as science fiction. Regardless of how the novel might be classified, the story it tells is far from engaging.

Alien invaders fill the skies with their ships while broadcasting an ultimatum to humans: move to Antarctica within 30 days or die. Personally, I’d break into one of the homes abandoned by rich people and spend my last 30 days sampling their wine cellars, but I have a serious aversion to cold weather. The survivors in Cold People have a serious aversion to being disintegrated.

The aliens have disabled the world’s most destructive weapons, leaving nations powerless to resist an alien occupation. Having rendered humans helpless to resist, why not disintegrate them all instead of disintegrating everyone who fails to make it to Antarctica? It’s not like the aliens are doing humans a favor by turning the least hospitable continent into a reservation. The question is never answered. Sadly, I found the many unswered questions to be more pressing than those the novel addresses.

The politics of self-interest during the invasion might be the most interesting part of the novel. One fellow converts an oil tanker into a ferry and takes as many passengers as he can, provided they aren’t too young or too old to work for the group’s survival. Israel uses its military to occupy its airports, commandeers all civilian aircraft regardless of the nations from which the planes originated, kicks all non-Israelis out of the airport, and uses the stolen aircraft exclusively to transport Israelis to Antarctica.

Some nations use the thirty days to fight against each other, hoping to secure a national foothold in Antarctica by wiping out competing nations. The wars don’t amount to much in the absence of missiles and bombs.

It turns out that people need to pull together to survive in Antarctica and that religious, ethnic, and national differences are no longer of consequeence. At Hope Town, settlers have put aside differences and embraced everyone in their diverse communities. But the novel isn’t really a kumbaya celebration of humanity coming together, because people soon understand that no amount of cooperation will keep them alive after they drink all the brandy and when the survival gear they brought with them wears out.

We are told little about how humans survive at all. Nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers still have power, but they can’t house a million people. Catching enough fish and seals to feed a million people seems like a daunting task, but establishing microbreweries just seems like a misuse of scarce resources.

Maybe I could have lived with the absence of necessary detail if the story had not moved well beyond implausibility. A geneticist who was carrying out forbidden experiments in China decides the human survival requires newborns to be genetically engineered to withstand cold weather. Within a generation, the engineering has produced two versions of ice-adapted parahumans. Children like Echo are born in the usual way and live a relatively normal life apart from having scales and preferring the cold to a warm environment.

The other parahumans, torn from wombs after a brief gestation and then imprisoned in caves, represent a more extreme version of adapted humanity. They are freakishly strong and smart. One of them, Eitan, can make himself transparent to blend in with ice. Oh, and did I mention the snow gorillas with bright orange eyes? Is it remotely conceivable that a geneticist can achieve these results, even using military supercomputers on aircraft carriers, in a generation or two? Tom Rob Smith didn’t convince me.

The point of the novel seems to be that humans are willing to create creatures who aren’t actually human to perpetuate some version of humanity. How snow gorillas advance that cause baffles me. Why it never occurs to anyone that tinkering with genetics to create monsters might be a bad idea is even more difficult to understand.

Echo is the only parahuman we meet who isn’t a monster. Her adaptation is supposedly less extreme, but she learns that she can control temperature — for example, by freezing a gun that someone points at her. How is this a conceivable genetic adaptation? Don’t ask because you won’t get an explanation. Just as implausible is the telepathy with which the parahumans are endowed. Oh, did I mention they can alter the chemistry of ice? I’m surprised they don’t have x-ray vision or the ability to fly. The novel might make a good comic book or Marvel movie but it makes little sense as a work of literature.

So does the novel have any actual humans a reader might care about? Some chapters focus on an Israeli soldier named Yotam Penzak. He expects to be left behind in Israel because he is not among the smartest or most politically connected. He’s chosen because he is a witness to a failed Russian strike at the airport and will presumably defend the Israeli settlement on Antarctica with vigor. In the absence of nationalized settlements, Yotam is instead tasked with assisting the Chinese geneticist despite having no background in science. Yotam was apparently chosen for his job because he was capable of loving without regard to individual differences. Yotam ends up falling in love with and becoming an advocate for an extreme parahuman.

The novel also focuses on an American woman named Liza and her Italian lover Atto. They fell in love in Italy when Atto invited Liza on a boat tour. Atto was so enamored with Liza that he didn’t try to shag her, which only angered Liza by depriving her of vacation sex with a hot Italian. Simplistic themes borrowed from romance fiction being what they are, Atto and Liza end up together on Antarctica, where they conceive Echo. A normal human boy named Tetu overlooks Echo’s scales and falls in love with her. I guess there aren’t many women to choose from after most of humanity is wiped out.

Perhaps Yotam and Atto fall for parahumans as a metaphor for relationships that are not cisgendered. To make sure no reader misses the point, a character asks, “Why does love have to be just one thing?” Fair enough. If a normal human and a parahuman want to love each other, why is that anyone else’s business? My problem is not with the theme but with the absurdity of ice-adapted parahumans who develop superpowers.

We also meet Kasim Abbas, an Iraqi who is now charged with transporting ice-adapted kids to McMurdo Station where the most extreme parahumans are developed, leaving their parents behind. And we meet Jinju, who escaped from a dictatorship in China. These characters are reminders of humans who live in varying states of subjugation, designed to make the reader think about the morality of creating parahumans and immediately imprisoning them. The more salient question might involve the morality of creating parahumans at all.

I suppose the novel might prompt book club discussions of the morality underlying the creation and enslavement of parahumans, although I doubt that many book clubs will take an interest in a story that makes no sense. If humans are going to die out because they can’t adapt to life in Antarcica, is it better for some monstrous version of humans to endure even if parahumans resemble a mixture of telepathic fish and the Incredible Hulk? I’m not sure the question is worth pondering.

While Cold People could be read as a story about the need to embrace diversity and reject the horrors of subjugation, the ultimate themes are “love conquers all” (although it didn’t conquer the aliens) and “humans aren’t so bad” (an ahistorical view that seems to be contradicted by the creation and subjugation of genetically altered servants). Near the end, a character says “the only way to survive on this continent is to find someone to love.” I guess snuggling might slow the length of time it takes to freeze to death, but learning how to fish and building shelters would be a better survival strategy.

I was particularly inspired (to laugh) by the deep conversation that Echo has with Tetu about what it feels like to be in love, a question posed in the midst of an inevitable battle between humans and parahumans. It’s always good to pause and discuss the philosophy of love while what little is left of humankind is under attack.

I enjoyed Child 44 and its progeny, in part because Smith created a strong atmosphere of realism in an unlikely story. His utter abandonment of reality in Cold People is disappointing.

NOT RECOMMENDED

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.

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