Luna Press, 2025, 198 p. Reviewed for ParSec 14.
Well. They do say you should start with a bang – and this novel does begin with a sentence reminiscent of the first in Iain Banks’s The Crow Road, though what unfolds is neither a bildungsroman nor (quite) a murder mystery but a decent enough piece of Science Fiction.
Viewpoint character Jocelyn Carsten (Joss,) is a hostage negotiator on the way home from managing a crisis on the planet Haitch when her passenger ship Tiktaalik suffers an explosion. She is still alive, just, but is injured, and is the sole survivor. All contact with the ship’s Central Hub – and the outside world – is lost. Only Harbour, the controlling intelligence of passenger mod Petal 4, is available to aid her.
After a trip to the med bay and an EVA to survey the damage to the ship, Harbour advises her to rest. When she wakes up there is another presence in the mod, a gemel; a holographic copy of Joss’s personality, but this has the physical appearance of her ex-wife, Alice Dray.
“A gemel” (the plural is also gemel) “is a sentient being generated from an individual’s psyche,” usually, but not always, taking on the appearance of their sires, “fuzzy copies of their progenitors, interpolated from memories and neurocircuitry, and can resemble their users to a disturbing degree,” but can be “warped by narcissists with fat wallets and the desire for more intimate personal assistants,” as had been the case with Gabrielle Vecher, on-site CEO for Haxen Mining Corps, and his gemel Malachi. Narcissus and Echo in the same package, thinks Joss. Gemel were not allowed physical bodies but, with safeguards, could patch into systems and control them from the inside. They “drew force from external sources, running off the excess electricity in the machines around them.”
This Not-Alice becomes a psychological prop for Joss and a device for the author to run Joss’s backstory past the reader, in instalments. Indeed, at times our access to Joss’s thoughts shifts between the present and her past memories with little or no signalling.
Joss’s rescue from isolation – when it comes (rather abruptly it must be said) – is by a military force co-commanded by none other than Alice Dray: the real one. Its mission is to investigate both why Tiktaalik and the tunnels on Haitch were blown up and to try to obtain the release of the humans still there held by gemel, an endeavour where Joss’s negotiating skills come to the fore. But Alice Dray’s co-commander – something of a loose cannon of the gung-ho military type – threatens to undermine Joss’s steps towards a solution of the situation.
It turns out Vecher had constructed a highly dangerous device deriving from mysterious markings on the tunnels on Haitch. And time is running out. “‘That thing Vecher made tore a hole in the fabric of the universe or whatever the hell you want to call it, and it’s growing, becoming less stable by the hour,’” says Joss during the negotiations.
Given her initial circumstances, Joss is unsurprisingly prone to periods of introspection and questioning both of herself and others.
Despite some problems with structure and pacing this is an engaging read and will push enough familiar buttons for SF readers to emerge satisfied.
The following did not appear in the published review.
Pedant’s corner:- Written in USian but with some British spellings. The planet Ross128 H’s nickname of Haitch is an egregious mispronunciation of that letter of the alphabet, “on a round-a-bout route” (roundabout – which was used elsewhere in the text for a meander -) once there was a single quotation mark where double ones are employed elsewhere, shlock (schlock,) back-peddling (back-pedalling,) hostage takers “174 million miles away” morphs to “140 million mile silences” during the communications gap, “sliding the stack of credits Joss had won back from her back across the table” (Joss was playing her opponent for the first time, so just ‘had won from her’.) “This is ….. based on …..?” (wasn’t a question so full stop, not question mark,) C02 (It’s not C zero two as was printed in the text, and the 2 ought to be a subscript,) “wracking your brain” (racking,) “sending some part of her ex’s upper-class snobbery would revolt” (sensing some part.) “‘Tell and I send you outside to repaint the serial number.’” (No clue. Who is Tell?) “what she can offer them are options” (I read ‘what she can offer them’ as a singular subject to the following verb; so ‘what she can offer them is options’,) “is different thing” (is a different thing.) “‘Ph damage right here’” (‘pH damage’ was meant and pH always has an upper case H and a lower case p – even at the start of a sentence,) “drowns out nothing but Callen’s voice” (everything but Callen’s voice,) “‘I pretty sure’” (I was pretty sure,) “for having sunken so low” (for having sunk so low.) “She doubts its convincing” (doubts it’s convincing,) “amid glow of the launch” (amid the glow of the launch,) a missing extraneous end quotation mark, a missing comma before the quotation mark at the end of a piece of dialogue. “‘How is that that they’ve got people down there?’” (How is it that they’ve got…,) “‘if we so much get within the distance’” (if we so much as get within…,) “it takes her moment” (it takes her a moment.) “Alice takes her seat again and switching back to their private comm.” (and switches back to,) “the metal partition the separated them” (partition that separated them.) “A name that inferred family, and what she’d always been taught to mean trust, love and guidance” (and that she’d always been taught…,) “but do they do afford” (but they do afford,) “of the Florenz’ cargo bay” (the Florenz’s,) “breathing apparatuses” (the plural of apparatus is apparatus,) “nothing but the judder of the engine and the clatter of equipment as rattles against the bulkheads” (could be rewritten more clearly,) “‘I can’t let you can’t do this’” (either, ‘I can’t let you do this’ or, ‘You can’t do this.)
