A Son of the Rock

Angry Robot, 2009. 373p

This is the freebie book I received in a BSFA mailing nearly a year ago. In it Karl Allman’s spaceship is attacked and destroyed and he has to descend with the help of only a protective gel to the surface of the nearest habitable planet, Isheimur, which has been partly terraformed and is inhabited by a group who live and speak in the manner of Icelanders. He is found broken-legged and unconscious and nursed back to health by the local Isheimuri whose chief thereafter regards him as under an obligation to repay this care and attention by working for him. Allman, of course, wishes to escape back to space. These scene setting chapters contained a prodigious quantity of relatively crude info-dumping.

Harvey makes much of the Isheimuri’s life on the edge – poor soil, thin air, lack of food, freezing temperatures, isolation etc – yet in the first part of the book Allman consumes seemingly more than adequate meals and the area teems with flocks of sheep. The Isheimuiri even have horses (which I always thought require a lot of fodder.) Hmmm.

The setting also gives Harvey the opportunity to portray illiberal politics, especially of the sexual variety, which he does attempt to gloss at one point; but all rather unconvincingly.

The narrative is shared between Allman, various Isheimuri and a hasty download from Allman’s ship which co-inhabits his brain. The ship download’s viewpoint, given the name Loki, a nod to Norse mythology – is narrated in the second person; and does not work well. The rest, more thankfully, are in third.

Other aspects of the writing also leave a lot to be desired. The viewpoint often shifts within a narrative section – a distracting authorial/editorial error. Sometimes a passage will contain information the viewpoint character cannot know. On occasion one will inform others about something the author (and we) know, but the character does not.

Even at the sentence level there are many infelicities. Take this sample phrase. “… he had an inner cauldron of anger that flared up at the slightest obstruction to life’s normal flow of life” (page 166.) Life’s normal flow of life? Wouldn’t the simpler usage “life’s normal flow” be more natural, and sufficient?

And parse this sentence if you will. (If you can.) “Arnbjorn and Orn pushed themselves to his father’s side.” Add in the fact that the “his” has no antecedent in a prior sentence and this becomes almost incomprehensible. It is certainly far harder work to read than if “their” replaced “his” or there were a sole subject of the verb, and “themselves” were “himself.”

We also have a terraforming machine that can “break down molecules.” Fair enough. But it also breaks “cerium and samarium from the ores down at sub-molecular level” (Eh?) “into nitrogen and oxygen, which it emits into the atmosphere.” The second part of this is scientific claptrap – nitrogen and oxygen as gases are molecular! The first also has holes – cerium and samarium are not molecular; neither are their ores, nor would they ever be, on or off Earth – and requires a power source so limitless that anything could be synthesised and so food, or any other, shortages would not be a problem; which, of course, vitiates the whole Isheimur scenario. And Harvey gives the impression (page 176) that carbon dioxide is dangerous to humans. It isn’t. Not at the levels indicated here.

Once an author loses our trust in this way it cannot be regained.

Perhaps I was now looking for flaws; because I certainly found them. Harvey has Allman say that the planet’s “magnetic field has just ‘flipped’ from warming to cooling” – more claptrap; a globe’s warming/cooling does not depend on its magnetic field orientation – and just over a page later, “carbon dioxide and water vapour will form a protective layer” (they would disperse throughout the atmosphere) “and seed the ozone layer with water and debris, thereby raising the temperature.” Well make your mind up, man! Is it the magnetic field change or the water/debris in the ozone layer which will cause the warming? In reality of course it would be neither.

The last section betrays a misunderstanding of the trajectoral dynamics of a spaceship under deceleration. Harvey has the engines of the Winter Song, a long-derelict ship once abandoned at Isheimur’s pole but which Allman has somehow managed to get to fly again, being switched on and off in an attempt to relieve strain on them while he tries to slam a comet – which the ship is pushing along with it – into Isheimur. (Don’t ask.) Such a procedure would result in the target being missed, not by a little but by a very long way indeed. It wouldn’t even get near the planet, still less hit it in a precise location. It’s as if a spaceship can be driven in exactly the same way as a car, and its arc were on a defined piece of roadway rather than being a complex interaction between gravity, acceleration and momentum.

Note that in all of the above I have not touched on the cardboardness of the characters, who are straight out of stock casting and provide us with no surprises, nor on Harvey’s habit of trying to create tension through exceedingly unsubtle cliffhangers.

I see from the book’s endpaper that Harvey has had four previous novels published. If this farrago is anything to go by that demands the question; how?

There is also, starting at page 412, an extract from Damage Time by Colin Harvey, headlined as Coming Spring 2010, which I didn’t read.

Needless to say, I shan’t be buying it.