A Son of the Rock

Titan Books, 2022, 349 p.

This was one of the nominees for The BSFA Award for Best Novel of 2022. I have not been much enthused by previous works by Powell, so only read this since it was available from my local library. My initial misgivings were reinforced by the first few chapters which were full of information dumping and journalese. However, once the story settled down and stopped jumping between time scales it did get better. A bit.

Many years in the past humanity was on the point of destruction. The nuclear missiles were on their way. Fortuitously at exactly the same time Frank Tucker commenced his experiment and penetrated the substrate surrounding space and time thus allowing wormhole travel. This caused a ripple in the substrate and, Raijin, an angel of the Benevolence, roused itself from its resting place in Jupiter’s atmosphere to save this now clearly worthy species and dispatched the weapons elsewhere. Now humanity inhabits a fleet of arks created by the Benevolence and travels the space ways as the Continuance but is forever forbidden to inhabit a planet again lest it destroy its environment as it had Earth’s. This is of course a deus ex machina, though unusually occurring at the beginning of the tale rather than its end. Life on the arks is what might be called easy. All necessities are provided, flick terminals provide almost instantaneous travel within and between ships via wormholes. There are still some arks which take delight in restrictions on behaviour though. The story is not about everyday existence in the Continuance, however.

Main viewpoint character, Eryn, is part of the Continuance’s Vanguard which scouts the space ahead of the main fleet for “potential threats or opportunities.” (What opportunities? Humans are forbidden from inhabiting a planet.) She pilots a scoutship by interacting with the substrate something not many humans are able to do. She is sent by the Vanguard as part of an expedition to look into what happened to a previous Vanguard sortie to a planet known as Candidate-623 where the crew including Eryn’s sister, Shay, has been lost. The details of what occurred are horrific and Candidate-623 contains a menace not only to Shay’s scoutship but the whole Continuance.

What follows is pretty standard space operatic fare in which the menace – misunderstood but also itself misunderstanding – is confronted, a process which requires the intervention of Raijin. The relationships between humans which Powell shows us are somewhat rudimentary and the feelings he tries to convey are at times described unconvincingly. His interest clearly lies in the pyrotechnics of his story, (close encounters with black holes, the nastiness of the way the menace operates etc.) I can see why at the level of incident people thought this worthy of nomination. Not for me though.

Pedant’s corner:- CO2 (CO₂,) Torres’ (several times, Torres’s,) asshole (arsehole, please,) “as their metal structures rusted” (only iron rusts. All metals corrode,) “temperatures far in advance of” (far in excess of,) “the very fabric of space and time were being warped” (the … fabric … was being warped,) liquify (liquefy,) “the prurient activities of the other guests,” (activities can’t be prurient, interest in them can be,) “magnified a fifteen million times” (no need for that ‘a’,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech, “a studier combat-rated replacement” (a sturdier,) “and roll if between his palms” (and roll it,) volcanism (vulcanism,) “wracking sobs” (racking,) “reached its crescendo” (sigh; reached its climax,) “to fall in love with a someone” (no need for the ‘a’,) dove (dived.)