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The Precipice: |
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lobal warming turned out to be more than just a slow nuisance everyone willed to their grandkids. It led to the Greenhouse Cliff—a sudden worldwide climate change that drowned cities and rocked nations. Raw materials, manufactured goods and energy were all dangerously depleted.
Tycoon Martin Humphries offers to fund Astro Corp., a spaceship manufacturer, in what sounds like an inspired solution: Mine raw materials from the asteroid belt for manufacture on the moon. Until now, the belt has been out of reach, but a nascent fusion drive could make the trip in days.
His real motivation is far from altruistic: Humphries has written off Earth and hopes to create a moon-based empire. His plan is to be in control of Astro by the time it becomes the dominant force linking Earth with the moon and the asteroids.
Astro CEO Dan Randolph seems like an easy mark for Humphries. He's been looking for a way to save the world, but his company is as battered as the world economy. He's willing to try fusion technology. But he doesn't want Humphries invested too deeply, so he recruits a third partner: the lunar city-state, Selene. The ship can now also be built with minimal labor cost using nano-robots, which are outlawed on Earth.
Humphries continues working to undermine Randolph. He recruits Pancho, a pilot, as a spy, but Pancho quickly turns counterspy for Randolph. Meanwhile, Humphries has fallen for Pancho's fellow pilot, Amanda. He tries to get Amanda scrubbed from the mission and feels betrayed when she chooses to stay on.
Randolph senses Humphries' schemes closing in and decides he must launch immediately, despite the fact that clearance has been denied due to red tape. He hopes that claiming mineral-rich asteroids will boost his company's stock enough that Humphries can't buy him out. He, Pancho and Amanda blast off for the belt unaware that nanobots have been secreted aboard to ensure that the maiden voyage of Randolph's ship will be its last.
Prefabricated protagonists
Ben Bova is old enough to know better. Not content to load his standby stock character, the obsessed but spineless billionaire, into the protagonist slot (as he did in Venus , which at least had some great travelogue stuff going for it), he has gone and shoved another one into the villain slot as well. The effect is like watching Alan Greenspan face off against Donald Trump over a particularly bruising game of Monopoly.
There's supposed to be resonance here: the villain is, after all, Martin Humphries, whose name has already been tarred elsewhere in the history of the solar system Bova is busy developing. But there's an inescapable problem: Humphries has no appealing qualities. He's been dressed in black and given a mustache to twirl, with a coil of rope ready by the railroad tracks. His repulsiveness merely taints stories in which his character is minor; in The Precipice, Humphries becomes a serious flaw in the novel itself.
On the flip side of this rich-guy gamesmanship is the crusty, scrappy, salty female space dog, Pancho, who is so much the opposite of the main characters she must have been created with punch cards. Pancho is another SF stock character: the resourceful, honest, forgotten, lower-class Working Person. Authors are scared to death of these characters and treat them like kings, lowering the bar of suspense. Fortunately, Pancho is an interesting character and carries the book on her back. Of Pancho's friend Amanda—the chesty-but-smart astronaut—the less said, the better.
Bova has written reams about what it's like to live on other worlds and spaceships, but his descriptions here are sketchy. There's little feel of the strangenesses of lunar life, and the trips through space seem like so much highway mileage. Some descriptive passages show the steady hand of an old sailor; others seem to bear an asterisk referring readers to better passages in his earlier novels.
Reading a book you have problems with is like watching a B movie. Oftentimes there'll be a third-tier character who makes you smile when he appears, because he's not weighted down by whatever's wrong with what's going on around him. This book has George Ambrose, Dan's big, shaggy, straight-talking assistant. I kept waiting for him to set Dan straight on a few things, but I contented myself with assuming that he rolled his eyes a few times. — Mark
Also in this issue: Maelstrom, by Peter Watts
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