Flanagan manages to kidnap Lena Smith, purported daughter of Earth's Cheo, flying alone in deep space. But it soon is clear that Lena is not actually the Cheo's daughter but his thousand-year-old mother, and Flanagan's plan is not a simple ransom ploy but part of a far more complex scheme to free his home planet and others subjugated by Earth. To have any chance of success, Flanagan must obtain the assistance of Lena and motivate all of the other space pirates to join his cause.

As Flanagan's scheme unfolds, we also learn much more about how the long and varied life of Lena as she rose from her humble 20th-century origins to become the progressive ruler of Earth and then mother of the Cheo, as told in Lena's "thought diary," recorded by the AI installed in her brain. We also learn Flanagan's life story as he progresses from famous blues musician to slave to rebel to space pirate, and to a lesser extent the history of the various members of his crew, which include a genius in a preteen body, a genetically engineered cat-woman, a likewise genetically engineered beast-man and a powerful and enigmatic alien flame beast. In the end, the success or failure of Flanagan's revolution will be determined by factors and forces none could foresee.

Inventive and audacious New Space Opera

Philip Palmer is a British writer for radio, television, film and theater, but Debatable Space is his first novel, and indeed it represents his first published science-fiction prose. It is nevertheless a remarkably accomplished novel that demonstrates the author's broad knowledge of SF tropes and literary conventions and that utilizes some of the best aspects of current New Space Opera and other contemporary SF and computer gaming, as well as some of the literary techniques that were cutting-edge in the 1960s.

Palmer combines these elements skillfully, blending the thriller narrative of the space pirates versus Earth with long sections of backstories of both Lena and Flanagan, and to a lesser extent other characters, thereby providing a fascinating picture of the next thousand years of human history. The entire novel is told in first person, with the point of view switching between Lena and Flanagan, with short interludes with the other members of Flanagan's pirate crew, and Palmer handles this difficult literary technique almost flawlessly, introducing new information and insights throughout the narrative that require re-evaluation of what has gone before. Palmer also has a deft ability not to take his narrative and characters too seriously while maintaining the human interest and narrative tension.

It would be difficult to catalog all of the most inventive aspects of this novel, but among the most striking to me are the powerful alien flame beasts, who generally choose to remain aloof from mankind and other lesser races while being fascinated by watching them (I couldn't help but be reminded of The Watcher from the Fantastic Four comics of the 1960s) and the enigmatically dangerous alien nanotech "bugs." The use of Doppelganger Robots to subjugate others is also interesting, but it may remind some readers too much of mindless computer role-playing games.

Debatable Space is clearly one of the best first novels to appear in the science-fiction field in recent years, and it marks Philip Palmer as a writer to watch for SF readers seeking innovative, cutting-edge space opera expanding on the traditions of authors ranging from Alfred Bester in the 1950s/1960s to the New Space Opera and other cutting-edge SF of the past decade by such writers as Alastair Reynolds, Peter Hamilton, Stephen Baxter, Charles Stross, Ken MacLeod, Paul McAuley, Ian McDonald, Richard Morgan, Greg Egan and others.