Resurrected Review: Aiding and Abetting, by Muriel Spark

Review: Aiding and Abetting, by Muriel Spark

by Rich Horton

The recent publication of a biography of the great British novelist Muriel Spark, Electric Spark, by Frances Wilson, has led to some welcome attention to the writer. And it reminds me that I should return to her -- I read about a dozen of her novel some decades ago, and I found them remarkable. My favorites are mostly among her earlier novels, such as Memento Mori (1959), The Girls of Slender Means (1963), and of course The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961); but she was writing first rate novels nearly until her death in 2006. Some of the sheer viciousness of her early novels was a bit dulled in her later works, perhaps, but they remained intriguing and ambiguously dark. Here's something very brief I wrote in 2001 (lightly revised here) about her second to last novel, which appeared in 2000.

Muriel Spark's Aiding and Abetting is another very short novel, at about 36,000 words.  This story is based on the true story of Lord Lucan, a dissolute English Earl who killed his children's nanny by mistake (thinking she was his wife) and then beat his wife, though she escaped.  Lucan fled prosecution, and was never found.  Many people think he is dead, but there were rumours and "Lucan sightings" for decades. Spark did take some liberties with the real life facts of the case in this book. (The crime occurred in 1974 and Lucan was not declared legally dead until 1999, just prior to the publication of Spark's novel.)

Spark creates an unusual psychiatrist named Hildegard Wolf, who has a criminal past of her own (also based on a true story, apparently). Dr. Wolf has a practice in Paris, and she gets two new clients, both of whom claim to be Lord Lucan.  Eventually they use their knowledge of her past as a guard against her exposing them to the police. She is disturbed by this: also she isn't sure which or either of the men may be Lord Lucan. Soon Wolf's lover is also involved in the search for the missing Lord, as are an old acquaintance of Lord Lucan and the daughter of another old friend of his.

These people end up on a merry chase, leading to a very satisfying resolution. The book is written in Spark's usual, very enjoyable, ironic/satiric voice. It is sharply but subtly moralistic about the attitudes of Lucan's class, and about the nature and persistence of guilt.  It is also a thoroughly enjoyable book to read.  Spark was a marvel, and this book, publishe in her early 80s, stands respectably in the company of her best work.

Old Bestseller Review: Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens

Thoughts on Charles Dickens' Great Expectations

by Rich Horton

What to say about Great Expectations, one of the most famous English novels of all time? I don’t really have an awful lot to add to the voluminous critical views. I am still in a sense quite new to Charles Dickens. I’ve read five of his novels (if we call A Christmas Carol a novel): Nicholas Nickleby and A Christmas Carol in my teens, and David Copperfield, Martin Chuzzlewit, and now Great Expectations within the last couple of years. In that list I would rank Great Expectations second behind David Copperfield.

Great Expectations was serialized in Dickens’ own magazine All the Year Round in 1860 and 1861, and published in book form (three volumes) by Chapman and Hall in 1861. It is a long book by most measures -- about 500 pages in my edition, nearly 200,000 words. I say long by most measures -- it’s not nearly as long as some other Dickens novels -- David Copperfield is 800 pages or about 370,000 words, and Nicholas Nickleby and Bleak House are both nearly as long as David Copperfield.

I’ll summarize the familiar story very quickly. There are some spoilers, though not for the very end, so skip this if you want, especially the third paragraph, which corresponds to the third volume of the novel. The hero is Philip Pirrip, called Pip for obvious reasons. He is an orphan who is raised by his rather abusive older sister and her very kind husband, the blacksmith Joe Gargery. As a young boy he meets an escaped convict who forces him to steal some tools from Joe so that he can free himself from his shackles, and he also gives the man some food. When Pip gets a bit older he is hired to regularly visit a strange woman, Miss Havisham, a wealthy spinster (in her 40s or early 50s though she is often portrayed as elderly) and Miss Havisham’s beautiful but very cruel adopted daughter Estella, and Pip conceives an unrequited love for Estella.

When Pip grows near adulthood, he is given a mysterious gift that will allow him to go to London and learn to be a gentleman. He is assured that there are "great expectations" for his future. He is sure that Miss Havisham is his sponsor, and that she intends for him to eventually marry Estella. In London he makes friends with a couple of men -- Herbert Pocket, the son of his tutor Matthew, who is also a relative of Miss Havisham; and John Wemmick, the clerk to the lawyer Mr. Jaggers who handles Pip’s "expectations", as well as Miss Havisham’s business. Pip learns gentlemanly ways but doesn’t really learn to be a man -- he runs into debt, spurns his old friends such as Joe as well as Biddy, a sweet and honest country woman who had seemed to love Pip when they were younger. 

And then one night he is surprised by a strange visitor -- Abel Magwitch, the escaped convict he had helped as a young child. Magwitch had been transported for life to Australia, and had become rich there. He had vowed to help his young benefactor -- to see him become a gentleman. Pip is astonished, and at first repulsed, and vows not to accept any more money from Magwitch. But over time he realizes that for all Magwitch’s coarse ways, and his truly criminal past, he is a loyal and fundamentally honest man. Pip comes to appreciate his friend Herbert more as well, and is given examples in behavior by people like Wemmick as well; and his character begins to take a turn, even as his expectations dwindle. I won’t detail the climax, or the various revelations that tie the intricate plot together, but novel comes to a powerful (and slightly ambiguous) conclusion.

I was delighted as the novel closed to find myself having guessed right about how much of it would work out -- from such small things as John Wemmick’s marriage to Miss Skiffins to larger things like the eventual fate of Biddy. In certain novels this is a source of satisfaction -- these revelations should be on the one hand surprises but surprises that arise properly from what came before, so that eventually they are not surprises. If you see what I mean. And of course there is Pip’s fate -- which is honestly worked out, and which, as I hint, ends a bit ambiguously. (And, apparently, somewhat differently than Dickens originally planned.)

It’s a wonderful novel, it really is. I have said that I prefer David Copperfield, and I do. That novel is bigger and baggier, fuller, messier. As I put it, if a novel is a prose work of some length with a flaw, David Copperfield is a prose work of great length with great flaws -- and amazing virtues as well, and a great heart. There is just more there, and more that I love. 

But it must be said that Great Expectations is more unified, more tightly plotted, better structured. And there are the joys of Dickens’ eccentrics: John Wemmick and his father, "the Aged"; the expert lawyer Mr Jaggers; the hypocritical Uncle Pumblechook, a slightly less evil version of Mr. Pecksniff from Martin Chuzzlewit; the obsessed Miss Havisham herself; loyal and exceedingly honest Joe Gargery; Miss Havisham’s relatives and their "expectations"; Trabb's boy, Pip's tormentor but also a key helper at one point; the aspiring actor Mr. Wopsle; and the villainous Orlick.

My final question, for anyone who has gotten this far, is -- what to read next by Dickens? Bleak House is an obvious answer, and I’ll certainly get there. I also want to read some more of the Christmas novellas -- "The Cricket on the Hearth", perhaps? But what other novels? Dombey and Son? Oliver Twist? Little Dorrit? What do people suggest?

Recent Substack posts from me

Here are some links to recent posts on my Substack:

A look at a 1956 issue of Fantastic. Not a great issue, but it does have four stories by a very young Robert Silverberg. https://open.substack.com/pub/richhorton314252/p/the-bad-old-stuff?r=arrxg&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

A parallel review of a science fiction magazine (Analog) and a mainstream little magazine (Zyzzyva): https://richhorton314252.substack.com/p/from-a-to-z-in-short-fiction-magazines

A review of Elizabeth Taylor's great novel Angel: https://richhorton314252.substack.com/p/satire-and-sympathy

A review of The Death of the Heart, by Elizabeth Bowen: https://richhorton314252.substack.com/p/innocence-and-emptiness

Rich Larson's excellent new short story collection Changelog: https://richhorton314252.substack.com/p/review-rich-larsons-changelog

Resurrected Review: Bones of the Earth, by Michael Swanwick

Another Resurrected Review, this one of Michael Swanwick's 2002 novel Bones of the Earth, which, it seems to me, isn't remembered as well as it ought to be.

Resurrected Review: Bones of the Earth, by Michael Swanwick

A review by Rich Horton

I've read some solid SF novels in 2002 so far -- The Years of Rice and Salt, Permanence, Schild's Ladder. It hasn't been a bad year. But nothing that really threw me until this one. Bones of the Earth is, about halfway through the year, clearly my favorite SF novel of 2002. It combines several well-integrated (and rather original) SFnal ideas with some neat scientific speculation, interesting characters, a compelling plot, and a powerfully argued theme about the nature of science and the human urge to do science.

The novel concerns a program to send paleontologists back to the Mesozoic Era to study dinosaurs in their natural environment. As such it is both a dinosaur novel and a time travel novel. Perhaps unexpectedly, the thematic heart of the book is in the time travel aspect, though the dinosaur speculations are worthwhile and fun in themselves.

The story opens in 2012 when Richard Leyster, a young paleontologist, is approached by a mysterious man named Griffin,offering him a mysterious job. He can tell him nothing about the job, but he can show him something -- a fresh Triceratops head. And he seems oddly certain that Leyster will accept the job. Leyster does, of course, and several months later he finds himself at a strange scientific conference, attending presentations about field work in the Mesozoic, and being accosted by a mysterious older woman (though she was born later than he) named Gertrude Salley, who implies a past relationship. Thus we have met the three main characters -- Leyster, the brilliant and studious scientist; Salley, brilliant herself but manipulative and unbound by law or rules; and Griffin, the tormented administrator of the entire program.

One key plot thread concerns a scheme by Christian fundamentalists to sabotage the time travel efforts, which ends up marooning a number of paleontologists in the Late Cretaceous. Griffin and his assistants try to loop back and forth through time to forestall this sabotage, but they are frustrated by the insistence of the sponsors of the time travel program that no paradoxes be created: thus anything they know to have "already happened" they cannot stop from happening. The other key thread involves Salley's attempts to subvert that law -- right at the beginning we see hints that she is trying to cause paradoxes, and her attempts continue, though her motive remains unclear to the reader for some time.

The scenes in the Cretaceous involve some well-handled "primitive survival" scenes, and some fascinating speculation about dinosaur social life and about the real causes of their extinction. The other thread involves some very clever handling of time loops and paradox, and an eventual trip far into the future to meet the Unchanging -- the mysterious beings who have offered the boon of time travel to humans. The resolution is surprising, logical, and achingly sad, or at least bittersweet. Swanwick is convincing treating human curiosity, our love of science. He is convincing treating human reactions to the possibility of fixing our past mistakes. There are some lovely set pieces involving encounters with prehistoric beasts, and one involving a young girl fascinated by Mesozoic sea life. The characters are well-drawn, particularly Griffin and his boss, the Old Man. Leyster and Salley are well done as well but a bit less fully realized -- or pass too clearly idealized to fit their parts. The minor characters are interesting, too. I loved the book, and I was quite moved by it. I think it is one of the best time travel novels in all of SF.

Resurrected Review: The Blood of a Dragon, by Lawrence Watt-Evans

Resurrected Review: The Blood of a Dragon, by Lawrence Watt-Evans

by Rich Horton

Lawrence Watt-Evans's Ethshar novels are uniformly enjoyable commonsensical light fantasy, somewhat in the mode of L. Sprague De Camp, set in a fantasy world distinguished by having multiple, mostly quite different, magical systems. I read through a number of them a few decades ago -- the first several appeared from Del Rey in the '80s and and '90s, a couple more came out from Tor, and Lawrence has continued them in the years since for Wildside Press -- about 15 novels have appeared to date. I ran into Lawrence for the first time in a while at Worldcon this year, and it seems a good time to resurrect this review of a novel from 1991.

Dumery of Shiphaven is a 12 year old boy, the son of a wealthy shipowner. It is time for him to choose a trade. He has no interest in the shipping business, and anyway his oldest brother will get the business. Dumery, at any rate, is interested in something else -- he wants to be a wizard. His father agrees to let him try -- but every wizard Dumery meets agrees that he has not a shred of magical talent. Dumery is frustrated and offended -- but then he happens to see a wizard negotiating with a seller of dragon's blood, which is an important ingredient is many spells. He realizes that if he can't be a wizard, he might get a measure of revenge by becoming a dragon's blood seller.

So Dumery tracks down the dragon hunter. Who, it turns out, has no interest in hiring an apprentice. Dumery decides not to give up. He decides to follow the dragon hunter to his home, and to insist on an apprenticeship. Thus, he ends up paying his way on a boat up the river, shoveling cow dung. His parents miss him, of course, and they hire a witch's apprentice to track him.

Both Dumery and the young witch end up following the dragon hunter to his home. The witch learns some secrets about witches and warlocks which (no pun intended!) seem a setup for a further book. Dumery, meanwhile, learns that the dragon hunter isn't quite what he seems. Also, that he still hasn't any wish for an apprentice. Dumery remains stubborn, and almost despite himself -- certainly not through any particular virtue of his own -- stumbles on a secret involving dragons, one in particular, that might just make his fortune.

It's an odd, interesting, book. There aren't exactly any heroes, nor really any villains. Dumery is certainly the central character, and he is in many ways quite an unpleasant young man. He is a thief, he's irresponsible, he's spoiled -- he's not by any means evil, but he's not good. The witch's apprentice is fairly appealing, but in the end a pretty minor character. The other characters are ordinary people, some of whom do pretty bad things -- but mostly through ignorance. The book is enjoyable reading throughout -- Watt-Evans is a very engaging writer. And the eventual solution is both logical (indeed, I thought of it much earlier ...) and in a way heroic.

Lawrence Watt-Evans is one of those writers who never fails to entertain. He's a Hugo winner (for the short story "Why I Left Harry's All-Night Hamburgers"), and a writer who easily moves between Fantasy and Science Fiction. I've enjoyed pretty much everything I've read by him, and this book is a good example of what he does best: tell of pretty ordinary people, in an intelligently constructed fantastical world, dealing with problems in believable and sensible -- if not always successful -- fashions.

Review: Victims of the Nova, by John Brunner

Review: Victims of the Nova, by John Brunner (1962, 1963, 1965, revised 1969, 1974, 1981, omnibus edition 1989)

by Rich Horton

Early John Brunner novels, I have learned, are a wonderful source of thoroughly competent SF adventure. My experience with Brunner in my younger years was probably not atypical. I first read Stand on Zanzibar, because it was a Hugo winner, and I liked it a fair amount, respected it even more. I read another novel from his "late" period, Total Eclipse, and liked it also. I shied away from other "mature" Brunner novels, like The Shockwave Rider and The Sheep Look Up, mostly out of fear that they would be downers. 

I did read a couple shorter Brunner novels from the middle or late part of his career, The Dramaturges of Yan and The Infinitive of Go. Neither seemed all that ambitious, and I thought The Dramaturges of Yan decent and The Infinitive of Go thoroughly awful.

Then, as part of my Ace Double reading project, I encountered several early Brunner novels. I knew that he had been very prolific, and that his early work was regarded as hackwork. And so I suppose it is -- but it's extremely good hackwork. The early Brunner novels I have read have one characteristic in common -- they are fun. They do not entirely lack ambition, either -- usually they treat at least reasonably interesting issues, though often somewhat rapidly -- one might say superficially. One of these Ace Doubles included The Repairmen of Cyclops. This book is one of three novels about the aftermath of a nova which destroyed a colony planet called Zarathustra. A number of ships escaped, but with limited supplies and no well-defined destination. Some of these ships reached habitable planets, but the survivors tended to lapse into barbarism.

In this space I have previously posted reviews of Castaways' World and The Repairmen of Cyclops. I figured it was time to post a review of Secret Agent of Terra -- and why not just assemble all three into a review of the omnibus. So here we are!

The other two novels were Castaway's World and Secret Agent of Terra. Brunner later revised them both, retitling the first Polymath and the second The Avengers of Carrig. An omnibus of all three novels (The Repairmen of Cyclops very lightly revised) was published in the UK in 1989 as Victims of the Nova.

Polymath was first published in 1963 as Castaways' World (half of an Ace Double), and the revised version under the new title in 1974 by DAW. It is set in the immediate aftermath of two ships from Zarathustra crashlanding on a planet. The viewpoint character is Lex, who turns out to have been in training to be a polymath. A polymath is an enhanced individual who serves at the point man for colonizing a new planet. Lex has many but not all of the skills a polymath would have -- what he mostly lacks is specific knowledge of this particular randomly arrived at planet. His starship crashed on the seashore. After a long winter his group has survived, outside the ship, and indeed their ship has foundered in the ocean. It is clear that they will have to make a permanent life on the planet, with limited resources. 

The other group crashed inland, and they holed up in the ship over the winter. But as spring arrives it seems they have all died. The seaside group begins to set up the rudiments of a colony. There are stresses, many centered about a promiscuous young woman named Delvia. In particular, a teenaged girl has formed a lesbian attraction to Delvia, only to be rejected when the older woman finds men available. 

Then an expedition is sent to the site of the inland starship. It turns out this group has survived, but under terrible conditions. They continue to believe that they will be able to refurbish their ship and head for another, more hospitable, world. The Captain has basically enslaved the passengers. Naturally they resent the comparative success of Lex's group -- setting up a dramatic resolution. The novel is very enjoyable, often thought-provoking though at times a bit forced -- good stuff if short of great.

The Avengers of Carrig was first published in 1962 as Secret Agent of Terra. It was also an Ace Double half. Its revision came out in 1969 from Dell (there was also a later DAW edition).

This book is set several hundred years after the Zarathustra disaster. Carrig is a major trade center on one of the Zarathustra Refugee Planets. By this time the Corps Galactia has monitors on each of the ZRPs, trying to prevent ugly incidents like a planet being enslaved by its neighbors, but otherwise letting them develop at their own pace. 

One Trader Heron comes to Carrig in time for the yearly kinghunt, in which the leading young men of Carrig hunt a dragonlike local creature, the parradile. The one who kills the parradile king becomes the ruler of the city. This year a promising young man is favored to become the first new ruler in 18 years. But a mysterious visitor has come to town with Heron. First he kills the Trader (who is of course a Corps Galactia agent), then he uses his blaster (Galactic tech) to kill the parradile and take over. 

The death of Heron leads the Corps to investigate. Young probationer Maddalena Santos, whose unpleasant attitude has nearly led to her expulsion from the Corps, gets the job, but her ship is shot down. Luckily she lands near the northern sanctuary, which turns out to be the remnants of the original Zarathustra spaceship. There she meets the young man who had been expected to kill the parradile king -- he has had to flee the new rulers of Carrig, who have forced the population to labor in uranium mines. The two eventually hatch a plot to oust the new ruler of Carrig -- in the process, of course, achieving Santos's goal of hunting down the Galactic renegades. They also learn an important secret about the parradiles that will change Carrig forever.

The ending is a bit odd and abrupt -- overdetermined would be the word I'd use. Still, it's a fun novel. Probably the least of the three ZRP novels, but still a good read.

The Repairmen of Cyclops is the third ZRP novel. It was serialized in Fantastic, January and February 1965, and published as half an Ace Double a couple of months later. DAW's reprint appeared in 1981.

The novel is set about 20 years after The Avengers of Carrig. By this time 21 ZRP planets have been discovered by the human Galactic society. Interactions with those planets are kept to a minimum, however -- it is felt that allowing them to develop on their own is preferable from the point of view of encouraging vibrant new cultures and ideas. The flipside of course is that many people, especially on the more primitive of these worlds, live perhaps unnecessary lives of poverty and misery.

Cyclops is not a ZRP, but a citizen of Cyclops was involved in the scheme to harvest nuclear material using the people of Carrig. The government of Cyclops, led by the authoritarian woman Alura Quisp, now favors a policy of encouraging Galactic intervention in the ZRPs, ostensibly to uplift their inhabitants to Galactic civilization. This novel opens with Quisp's lover hunting a wolfshark, and losing a leg in the process. He is rescued by a local fisherman, and taken to the nearest hospital, which happens to be run by the Galactic Patrol, or Corps, instead of Cyclops. The Patrol has much better facilities, and they discover that the leg the wolfshark chewed off wasn't the man's own leg.

Maddalena Santos returns, now visiting her old boss (who also appeared in The Avengers of Carrig) at the base on Cyclops. She is bored after spending 20 years not interfering on a primitive planet. So she gladly gets involved in the mystery of the anomalous leg. Also involved are her boss, and the fisherman, really a boy, who rescued the shark hunter. We quickly gather what's really going on -- lacking regeneration tech, a doctor on Cyclops has instead been repairing patients with parts taken from people kidnapped from yet another ZRP. It is up to Maddalena and the others to stop these people -- a job complicated by the aging Alura Quisp's desire for a new young body, and by her willingness to take extreme political steps to interfere with the Corps.

As with so many novels from this period (Brunner's and others), it sets up the situation rather nicely, then rushes way too swiftly to a conclusion. And like The Avengers of Carrig, the ending is perhaps "overdetermined" -- by which I mean that the good guys win very easily, and as it were in multiple ways. I still quite liked it.

I continue to find "early Brunner" great fun. I don't really want to oversell his early work -- it's often rushed, the worldbuilding is not terribly impressive, there are plenty of implausibilities. We're not talking lost classics here, nor novels that were unfairly deprived of Hugos. But almost without exception, the several pre-Stand on Zanzibar Brunner novels that I have read in the past year or so have been unpretentious, somewhat original, thoughtful, and purely enjoyable. 

Review: The Blighted Stars, by Megan O'Keefe

Review: The Blighted Stars, by Megan O'Keefe

by Rich Horton

My latest read for the book club I'm a member of was Megan O'Keefe's 2023 novel The Blighted Stars, the first in a trilogy (collectively called The Devoured Worlds) which was completed rapidly with The Fractured Dark (2023) and The Bound Worlds (2024). The entire trilogy was written during the pandemic, and there is certainly an infectious agent driving much of the plot -- but O'Keefe says she doesn't think of it as a "pandemic novel" and I think in many ways she may be right. At any rate, I read the book quickly, with a fair amount of enjoyment and also lots of reservations. I will say however that encountering books like this is one of the benefits of being in a book club, because I doubt I'd have read it otherwise, and while I can't call it great I can say I was happy enough to read it. (I should add that I did a sort of hybrid reading -- the audiobook on my daily commute, but the print version at home. The audiobook is read, quite well, by Ciaran Saward.)

O'Keefe published her first novel, Steal the Sky, in 2016, part of a fantasy trilogy, The Scorched Continent. A space opera trilogy, The Protectorate, followed. So one might say she's a "trilogist"! (She's also published a couple of short stories, a couple of novellas (one set in the Scorched Continent universe), and, just this year, a standalone space opera, The Two Lies of Faven Sythe.)

The Blighted Stars opens with two starships, the Amaranth and the Einkorn, orbiting a world called "Sixth Cradle" -- as it is the sixth known Earthlike world that may serve as a "cradle" for humanity -- which, we soon realize, lives mostly in space after Earth and the other "cradles" have been overrun by "the shroud". Tarquin Mercator is the son of Acaelus Mercator, the leader of the Mercator corporation, one of the five MERIT companies that rule humanity. Tarquin is a geologist, a good scientist but painfully aware that he doesn't have the ruthlessness required to lead Mercator. He is on this mission planning to prove once and for all that the "shroud" that has blighted Earth and the other cradles was not caused by Mercator -- for Mercator's power is derived from their monopoly on the mining of relkatite, a substance critical for the warp drives of their starships, and for many other aspects of the technology that humanity uses.

There are some other key aspects of this future. One of the most important is the use of brain scans which can be download into "printed" bodies, achieving extended life spans in more or less young and healthy bodies -- though this process is limited because one must have died before being reprinted, and the repeated experience of death stresses the brain states enough that eventually one "cracks" -- goes insane. On the political side, this is a seriously class-based society, with family members of the corporations at the top, employees of the corporation at the next level, and so on -- and access to the reprinting options among other privileges is controlled by the corporations. 

Finally, there is a political opposition: Unionists and Conservators, respectively the more political and more revolutionary and violent branches of the people who want to overthrow the corporate ruling structure. And the Conservators, at least, are convinced that it is Mercator's mining of relkatite that has brought the "shroud" to all the cradle worlds. One of the Conservator leaders, Naira Sharp, had been Acaelus Mercator's "exemplar" -- essentially, a bodyguard -- until she had defected. She and her fellows have been blowing up starships and the like in the hopes of stopping the mining of relkatite. But Naira had been captured and put on trial, and Tarquin Mercator's testimony about the impossibility of the mining operations causing the shroud had led to her conviction.

So -- I've gone on for a while, but all of the above is backstory. At the opening there is a sudden crisis. The drones used to explore Sixth Cradle don't seem to be functioning. And then the Einkorn opens fire on the Amaranth. This is presumed to be a Conservator plot, and as the Amaranth is about to explode, the only options are to escape to the surface of Sixth Cradle, or to cast one's brain scan back home via ansible. Acaelus announces that he and Tarquin are going to cast home, while his new exemplar, Lockhart, will manage the rest of the crew. But Tarquin disobeys, seeing that Acaelus' plan is to abandon the entire crew. Instead, he helps as many people as possible onto a shuttle, and they desperately descend to the planet, with the help of Ex Lockhart. And we learn immediately that Lockhart is actually Naira Sharp, who has somehow managed to get her brain scan downloaded to the print meant for Lockhart.

(Most readers will realize immediately that among other things this is an "enemies-to-lovers" romance. This isn't a criticism -- that can be, often is, a very tired trope, but O'Keefe handles it quite well here, and there is a nice twist at the end.)

I've gone on longer setting up the novel -- and to some extent I'm trying to hint that the world O'Keefe has built for the trilogy is pretty complex -- and mostly interestingly so. And there are surprising realizations that arise during the story that alter our original expectations. (I did have a hard time making sense of the economics (a problem with lots of SF!) and I thought some of the science rather dodgy.) The bulk of the story, then, is set on the planet's surface. The survivors establish a camp, and Tarquin must navigate their natural suspicion of him as a Mercator heir, while trying to establish a rapport. The hope is to find a way to get to the Einkorn, but the Einkorn isn't communicating. Tarquin and Naira (who he still thinks is Lockhart) begin to reluctantly grow close. Tarquin makes some increasingly shocking discoveries about the planet, beginning with the fact that it too is infected by the shroud, and is thus dying. But there are other mysteries -- the tiny boreholes in the ground, the ore they find that is related to relkatite but not the same, the presence of other creatures that should not have any way of living there, and a realization that there was already a Mercator presence on the planet. Both Tarquin's and Naira's preconceptions about the nature of the shroud and the effects of Mercator mining are shattered. In addition, there are brief interludes from the point of view of the Einkorn itself, and from the point of view of Acaelus, in a new body back in the Solar system. There is the mystery of what happened to Tarquin's mother. And there is an extended (but not unduly so) resolution back home -- obviously a slingshot to the rest of the trilogy.

I am of two minds about this novel. On the good side, the world it is set in is intriguing, with some familiar ideas, yes, but well-handled ones. The central romance is pretty involving -- it kept my interest and I was willing to believe in it. And I would like to see how the political and personal issues are resolved by the end of the trilogy. On the other hand, it's a bit too long -- some judicious editing could probably have cut 20% without harming the novel. Part of this is excessive telling of the characters' thoughts -- this too seems an abiding problem with contemporary SF. (Tell not show isn't an absolute rule, but I think it is important in dealing with interiority, especially as many people don't really understand their motivations and feelings well enough to plausibly relate them the way they are done here.) The prose is solid but also probably needed one more cleanup pass. The characters outside of Tarquin and Naira don't come to life. In the end -- this is decent work but not brilliant.