Through the single-minded perseverance of people like Mariesa Van Huyten, a moneyed matriarch, and Roberta Carson, an outspoken webcaster, the moribund Planetary Defense Committee slowly starts to breathe again. Like moths to flame, a crackerjack team assembles itself around a projected three-ship mission to deflect the Bean. At first, self-satisfied software genius Jimmy Poole is along for the financing, but it's not long before he's banging out code to support the mission. Chase Coughlin, the crusty, lusty space veteran, helps show the ropes to Jacinta Rosario, a hot but chaste young pilot.
After all the planning, plotting, test flights, falling out and reconciliations, the ships are finally on their way. They knew that the asteroids had been turbo-equipped by the unknown aliens, but they were startled to find a portentous door leading into the traveling rock. Inside, they find a control room. Now the all-star team is faced with a new set of choices: Do they blow up the asteroid, use the demolitions they brought with them to deflect it away from Earth--or try to figure out the controls and fly the Bean home?
Disaster with a not-so-deep impact
Michael Flynn seems to think he's channeling Robert Heinlein, but the picture is coming in a little fuzzy. The echoes are there--for example, there's the backdrop of space as politics. Futuristic slang neologisms, some rather more successful than others, recall Stranger in a Strange Land. The characters are colorful and earthy in a Heinleinesque sort of way. But it doesn't add up. The dark political and economic clouds that are so foreboding of texture in the first chapters fade into mere set decoration, and then vanish entirely. There's none of the irony of the meaningless political standoff of Arthur C. Clarke's 2010, much less the human drama of the rebellion in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. The hurdles in the way of Earth's ability to meet the threat seem to drop away, and the second half of the book descends into space opera.
The characters are vending-machine issue and the plot develops perfunctorily. Jacinta is exceptionally beautiful, supremely capable and secretly vulnerable, just like every single spacefaring woman of the future. Naturally, Chase, the space dog with a heart of gold, starts to notice her once they're locked in the vacuum of space. And it's no surprise when the story deposits us in front of that old cliché: the aliens' mysterious door. Suspense is defused early by the trivializing nickname "Bean," and neither Flynn nor his characters displays any curiosity whatsoever about the Visitors who aimed this rock at Earth in the first place.
Falling Stars is the fourth book in a series, continuing the stories of characters previously met in Firestar, Rogue Star and Lodestar. But there's little sense of suspense or drama carried forward from previous stories, while newcomers might feel some characters are sketchily introduced or are popping in for an unnecessary cameo. The lightweight climax might suffice for one book, but not for four.
It's difficult to integrate politics and economics with a story that takes place in space far from Earth. But none of the political tension hinted at early on is brought aboard the ships with our heroes, making the chief Earth-bound plots seem to me like just a set of inconveniences to be gotten out of the way before the rocket-ship story can begin. -- Mark
