Gollancz, 2023, 443 p, including 3 p Afterword. Reviewed for ParSec 9.

In 2255 humanity has recovered from the ravages of climate change on Earth and extended into the Solar System. Earth is dominant, with a stranglehold on the Lunar Consortium’s expansionary plans and its helium-3 extraction exports via control of the supply of nitrogen needed as a buffer gas. However, schemes are in hand for Earth to mine the gas giants for helium-3 to fuel a nuclear fusion engine which will cut journey times across the Solar System from decades to years. A third group called Conservers does not wish to deplete the Solar System’s resources but has sent out the Shadow, a ship powered by solar sails, to the Oort Cloud to investigate the possibility of Planet Nine orbiting there.

Planet Nine, as found, could fall into the venerable SF category of Big Dumb Object, except it’s not big – it’s an apparent black hole, ten times Earth-mass – and it’s not dumb. Salma, a teenager born on the voyage, discovers its Hawking radiation harbours patterns. It is sending out a message. As soon as the Shadow’s crew echoes the signal back, the Hawking radiation changes form and the galaxy’s central core simultaneously turns red from a quasar emanation. As coincidences go this would be an almighty one but how could a signal sent in the here and now cause an event to have occurred thousands of years ago so many light years away? The quasar’s red light bathes the whole Solar System and starts to increase the temperatures of every orbiting body within it, slowly but inexorably. This, however, is a challenge which is nothing but background for most of the book.

Standing off some distance away, the Shadow’s crew then sends the second pattern back to the object. It expands immediately to a larger size and forms a surface with one Earth standard gravity. And on that surface lies a cylindrical container. The three crew members sent down to the surface find it has an alien inside, an alien which resembles a bird but with human resemblances. This is swiftly dubbed Feathers. Creation Node is not just a BDO novel, then, but also a first contact one. Communication with Feathers is almost impossible except by gesture so who, or what, she is, is a mystery. Both the Earth authorities and the Lunar Consortium decide it is imperative to send missions to Shadow’s location as soon as possible.

A lot of the earlier part of the book (sometimes spoiled by information dumping of the ‘she knew’ variety and intermittent references to several of the characters wearing black pendants; a decorative choice never fully explained) is taken up with Earth’s preparations of its fusion powered ship, Cronus, to launch from Saturn orbit and the Lunar Consortium’s unannounced mission to join it. This is something of a drag on the ongoing story in the Oort cloud (albeit with a set piece collision in space to be described.) We could charitably interpret this longueur as Baxter trying to convey the time scale involved. Even with the new drive the joint mission to the changed black hole takes eleven years.

The climax of the novel is almost literally (but not quite, since Baxter tips us the wink to its existence in earlier short chapters) a deus ex machina, the manifestation of a creature with god-like powers which can move both itself and our humans between universes and across space and time. Both Planet Nine and the quasar are under its control, the details of which I’ll leave to the reader to discover. It presents a dilemma to the humans at the site, though.

Baxter’s immersion in SF shines through, Creation Node contains more than a few nods to Arthur C Clarke – sunjammers, space elevators, an enigmatic object that eventually provides a path to elsewhere in the universe – to please longstanding SF buffs. Its invocations of other universes and the vastness of time tickle the sense of wonder but the humans its tale is fashioned around are not its primary focus. Ideas are the thing here. This is good old SF for the good old SF reader.

Pedant’s corner:- “to the second. Hawking set” (has no need of that full stop,) Feathers’ (several times; Feathers’s) “‘when we first found here’” (found her makes more sense,) “had managed to assemble of fair-sized heaps of the stuff” (doesn’t need the ‘of’ before fair-sized,) “desertification was increasing such places as the Sahel” (was increasing in such places,) “seemed to rise to a crescendo” (the crescendo is the rise, not its climax,) “nothing remained to be sucked out” (it wasn’t sucked out, it was pushed out into a vacuum – which Baxter implicitly acknowledges two lines later with “after the initial plume of lost air had pushed stuff out into space,) a missing open quote mark before a piece of direct speech, “‘these are all stones are deep black’” (either ‘these are all stones which are deep black’ or these stones are all deep black’,) “twenty thousand years of emitted a galaxy core heat” (doesn’t need that ‘a’.)

Grafton, 1992, 345 p (including a fourteen page appendix outlining the intricacies of baseball.)

The start of this wasn’t very encouraging. Police chief Al Bates is called into a murder scene where the victim – an off-world diplomat – has had his throat cut from ear to ear. I know this novel is from 1992 but the thought of another crime/SF mash-up was oddly dispiriting. Yet it turned out to be readable enough despite Chief Bates, while popping up from time to time throughout, not being the book’s main focus, and that because it doesn’t really have one.

Jack Mulligan, a semi-pro baseball player with psionic abilities, comes across the murder site and offers his services to the police but he encounters a very powerful and debilitating psychic block, presumably emanating from the murderer. In the aftermath various other people, potential witnesses, though the killer has left no obvious traces of himself, are found slaughtered in the same way.

Mulligan’s not even nascent relationship with a woman called Lacey, whose occupation is somewhat obscure but seems to be on the border of illegality, is the subject of an attempt by Kerr to round out her characters but the representation verges on the adolescent. Also in the mix is a flesh-eating disease caused by a bacterium picked up in an unsalubrious area known as the Rat Yard, a disease whose main side effect is it causes its victims to smell strongly of vinegar and which the murderer has contracted.

The characters here – barring an AI and the brief conversations held via psychic means – all speak in a stripped down English known as Merrkan which in an Author’s Note Kerr says is a future projection of (perhaps even thinner than) how people in the US Sunbelt converse already. In addition, the inhabitants of Polar City all have a seemingly inveterate interest in baseball, which, to a Brit, comes across as just weird. I know it’s the national game of the US but, come on, imagine a British SF novel which featured cricket, for example. It’s not going to happen.

The story here is really all over the place, the murders are resolved about three-quarters of the way through and then the tale morphs into an interplanetary (or interspaceship) chase sequence dealing with a First Contact scenario. Okay, the aliens were the source of the bacterium but it’s still a jarring shift of emphasis.

The blurb – from Locus – on the book’s front cover claims Polar City Blues is, “A Hell of a lot of fun.” Fun? Multiple gruesome murders, and it is fun? There are humorous moments but these mainly involve miscommunications.

Overall Polar City Blues is inconsequential. I doubt I’ll bother with any more from Kerr.

Pedant’s corner:- “At the bar are a scattering” (At the bar is a scattering,) “A couple … cavort in a fountain” (a couple cavorts,) passage way (passageway,) “there are a number of” (there is a number of,) “that Outworld bacteria” (bacterium,) “for a-ways” (it was over a line break but it still ought to be ‘a ways’.) Cajones (that Spanish word is spelled ‘cojones’,) jerry-rigged (jury-rigged,) “the occasional pair of Hoppers bounce along” (a pair bounces,) a military captain refers to as Mr Lacey. (Lacey is a woman,) “it takes both of their concentration” (both of their concentrations.)