A friend of mine, James Nicoll, asked me and a few other mutual amigos to review a self-published science fiction novel: Through Struggle, The Stars, by John Lumpkin. Somewhat reluctantly, I downloaded and read it. To my surprise, I enjoyed the read while remaining unconvinced by the scenario. I will also put up my friends reviews (all written separately). Here (with one change) is mine:
Through Struggle, The Stars is much
better than a self-published novel has any right to be. It’s a tale of a war in
the year 2140 between China and Japan, told through the eyes of a new officer
in the United States Space Force. The USSF — which has inexplicably adopted
naval ranks and conventions despite the name — exists to defend both the
terrestrial United States and its interstellar colonies. The setting is hard
science fiction, in the sense that the only gimme is a system of wormholes to
allow interstellar travel. No aliens; space vessels rotate for gravity; and
while they use fusion engines that we have no idea how to build the accelerations
involved are tiny. The politics aren’t self-evidently silly and the populations
of the colony worlds are sensibly low. In fact, it reads like the kind of novel
that I tried to write as a teenager, only well-crafted.
From the tone of the above paragraph, I’m sure that you can guess that
my overall review is going to be negative. Since the book has a lot of positive
qualities, let me start with them. First and foremost, I kept reading! I am not
the sort of person who finishes every book he starts. In fact, I finish only a
small minority of them. Most of my reading is work-related nonfiction and thus
mostly skimmed. As for novels, I’m a high-friction reader: the moment I have to
work to maintain my attention, my reading speed drops quickly — and it takes
very little to get me to quit. This novel I did not quit. That is an extremely
good thing.
Second, I very much liked how the majority of the American characters
had Spanish last names. Finally, somebody who thinks about demographics! I also
liked that they threw in Spanish catch-phrases, but just as that: catch
phrases. That is exactly how Spanish survives after several generations. We
learn (from a Senate vote) that the United States has at least 52 states by
2140 and the author opens the possibility that Cuba might be one of them.
Normally, that would get my “silly future cliché” alert up, but the allusion is
simply that one enlisted USSF person has Havana for a home town. That would be
possible today. While I do not believe that Cuba will ever become part of
the United States it is supremely easy to believe that the country will
continue to have a “special relationship” with the mainland, up to and
including free migration. So the throwaway line didn’t desuspend my
disbelief — after all, add Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia and you’ve
got 52 right there.
The characters were believable, if somewhat clichéd. Actually, “clichéd”
isn’t the right word. They were believable enough for me to care about them
(and therefore keep reading) but they weren’t distinct enough for me to really
remember any details. The one exception was a Chinese
gangster-turned-intelligence-agent, and he stuck with me because I didn’t really ever believe in him. He
wasn’t a cliché by any means; he just seemed too much like an agent of the
plot, a character created by “The Narrative” rather than a real person who
naturally found himself involved with the other people in the book. (The phrase
in quotes is a reference to Scalzi’s Redshirts.)
The politics were well-handled … but lacking. First, the portrayal of
China as a quasi-democracy felt wrong. Such regimes first appeared in Latin
America in the late-nineteenth century; they quickly collapsed (via coups or
civil wars) or turned into full-on dictatorships. That pattern continued
through the 20th century with a third wrinkle: several of the
quasi-democracies turned quickly into real democracies. Mexico’s second dictatorship-in-drag
collapsed in the 1990s; even in Turkey today, the “deep state” seems to be on
its last legs. It strained my belief to think that China would be ruled by a century-old corrupt oligarchy 130 years
from now. (A newly-minted corrupt oligarchy would be a different story.)
Second, the politics of the war were given disappointingly short shrift.
It is indisputable that major inter-state war has gone into serious decline
since 1945. It strikes me as very plausible that it could see a comeback. The novel
provides a necessary condition: powerful directed-energy weapons make it at
least plausible that politicians would believe that they could control the
ladder of escalation. (The prevalence of robotic and precision weapons had a
similar effect.) Logically, therefore, the war began as a limited conflict
fought at sea and in space; one can imagine future audiences cheering on such a
contest.
The problem is that there was something very pro forma about the backdrop. There is an interesting question
about whether industrialized interstate war (limited or not) is possible in a
modern democratic environment. Can modern democratic politicians capitalize on violence? Would modern audiences countenance unleashing death in their
names for anything less than national survival? These questions are
unaddressed. When the author reveals the reason the American president maneuvered
the U.S. into the war, it comes as an anticlimax. (It depends on the FTL McGuffin.)
There were some references to U.S. domestic opposition, but
mostly in the context of “ethnic Chinese” congressmen objecting to a war with
the madre patria. (Which is, I have to say, a silly idea — in a world where
China has been rich for a century, there will be no discernable
Chinese-American community have been little net immigration from China for at least as long. The descendents of past and current immigrants will have long since assimilated; second-generation outmarriage among Chinese-Americans currently tops 50%.) There is a subplot involving a Taiwanese independence
movement that strained credibility. In short, the politics never became
unbelievable — but they were underexplored.
Which brings me to the killer problem: the book read like it took place
in 2012, 2030 on the outside. It was simply unbelievable as a depiction of life
in 2140. The ground combat scenes, for example, read like they happened last
week. (The main characters were a little too composed during the fighting, but
that’s a different issue.) Sure, there were exoskeletons and lasers from space,
but that felt like window-dressing. Nothing about microdrones, intelligent
robotic “pack animals,” self-guided ammunition ... the tactics of ground combat were
basically unchanged.
The same problem afflicted the rest of the book. There were passing
mentions of self-driving vehicles, advanced drones, machine translation, advanced
3-D printing, computer interfaces implanted in people’s eyeballs and “the best
genes that money could buy,” but none of that had any appreciable effect on the
course of the action or the social background in which the characters operated.
The author failed completely at giving the impression that the book took place
in the future. Now, it is possible that the author is correct that by 2140 automation
will advance, sensor technology improve, cyborgization continue, 3-D printing
mature and gene modification become common among the rich ... yet with daily life
remaining about the same as in 2012. (Along with military organizations, ground combat
and democratic politics.) That is possible! And hell, as a small-c
conservative, I would very much like it to be true. But it’s a tall order, and
a writer who wants to keep my disbelief suspended needs to make the case. The author
of this book does not even try.
As a coda, I had three other quibbles. First, while the space combat
scenes seemed well thought through, I did have to wonder what all those people
on board the ships were actually doing. Even if our 22nd-century space
navies decide to keep human commanders in the loop rather than entrusting it
all to the AI’s, one would think that the ships would operate with tiny
stripped-down crews and lots of maintenance robots. If that’s wrong, I want to
know why.
Second, the dynamics of space colonization didn’t make much sense, at
least not on the surface. There wasn’t much commerce, so the motivation seemed
to be non-economic. The few colonies we saw were not rich places, so there was
some indication that the author realized the problem, but it wasn’t explicit.
Nothing caused me to recoil, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something
didn’t make sense about the scenario.
Lastly, there were a few dumb throwaways. A reference to helium-3 mining
on the Moon. Ugh. A reference to asteroid mining. Slightly more plausible for a
few rare elements, but double-ugh as something needed to power Earth industry. And
then there was a major lacuna for a book about geopolitics: a bit about coastal
protections for major cities was the only reference to global warming.
In short, the book succeeded as a yarn. But it failed as science
fiction. Props for the Spanish last names, thinking through the dynamics of
orbital combat, and avoiding (most) clichés. But minus for essentially writing
“2012 in Space!” rather than something about the year 2140.
I would read other works by the author; he shows a lot of promise. I’m
not sure that I would read other works set in the same universe, though. None of my objections require him to rewrite his
background — just explore it in greater depth. The end result, however, won’t
look much like the “2012 in Space” that we saw. Maybe Charlie Stross would let him bounce ideas around?
Comments welcome on any and all of the topics raised above.
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