ASA shuttle pilot
Judy Gallagher and civilian scientist Allan Meisner barely know each other. Sharing the same day-after-tomorrow shuttle mission, they have no idea that their fates will soon become linked on a wild ride across the cosmos. For when Allan activates his "getaway special" experiment-on-the-cheap, he triggers a global paradigm shift in the course of humanity. And as with most such shifts, old structures must dangerously shatter before new ones can be built.
Allan's gadget, we learn, is nothing less than a cheap, working hyperdrive, and it instantly propels the shuttle across the solar system. Quickly calibrating his heretofore untested machine, Allan announces that all is well and that in an altruistic, idealistic gesture, plans for the device have already been automatically broadcast across Earth. The shuttle and its crew return to find immediate chaos building among the globe's nations. Old centers of power struggle to maintain the status quo, while the man in the street tries to assimilate a world suddenly opened wide to infinity.
Escaping orbital arrest, Allan and an enthusiastic Judy, now partners in the "criminal" liberation of humanity, manage to return to Earth. Finding refuge with a sympathetic couple in the wilds of Wyoming, the pair take the pulse of the hyperdrive developments, then decide to partake of the new freedoms themselves. Building a makeshift spaceship out of a sparkling new septic tank—basically a heavy-duty plastic tub—they take off just one step ahead of the authorities who have finally tracked them down.
Visiting several intriguing but ultimately disappointing solar systems, Allan and Judy finally end up on a lovely planet they whimsically name Zork. But Zork holds not only native surprises, but also an exploratory party from yet another star system. Establishing good relations with these sentients, Allan and Judy bum a ride back to Earth (their septic tank has suffered an air leak) on the alien ship, in exchange for the plans to the hyperdrive. But back under the light of Sol, they discover that Earth is on the verge of Armageddon, not Utopia, and only drastic measures can save the planet—before the visiting aliens decide to wipe out humanity as a dangerous menace.
The heart of SF is still beating
Science fiction has a large history of fanciful spaceships and oddball warp drives. Poul Anderson famously powered one of his interplanetary crafts with beer (The Makeshift Rocket [1958]). And Pat Murphy's There and Back Again (1999) opened with a steam-powered rocket. Most pertinent as an ancestor to Oltion's book is Harry Harrison's The Daleth Effect (1970), which tells of a similar world-transforming discovery, and even includes the image Oltion uses of a submarine converted to vacuum duty. But Oltion disposes of the material of Harrison's whole novel in the first half of Getaway, then goes on to new frontiers which resonate more with Heinlein's classic Have Spacesuit—Will Travel (1958).
Once the aliens are encountered—and they themselves are a fine invention, being a hive mind whose individual components are tiny butterfly-like beings—this novel ratchets up several notches. After a well-done "first contact" interlude, the stakes become not merely humanity's destiny, but the destiny of the whole cosmos of sentient beings. With this maneuver, Oltion takes his material into a territory that lesser writers might have steered clear of, thus exhibiting his diligence in tackling every last ramification of his speculations.
This craftsmanly diligence is on display throughout the book. Oltion does not scant any of the hard realities of his extrapolations, either the sociopolitical ones or the technical ones. His utterly believable and practical detailing of the way to convert a sewage receptacle to an interstellar voyager, for instance, shows just how much effort he's invested in making this outrageous tale seem totally plausible. Of course, he's aided in this by the likeability of his characters, all of them exuberant and memorable. Allan possesses the mad soul of a Rucker protagonist, while Judy is a spunky, brash heroine whose last name perhaps is meant to evoke Henry Kuttner's wacky inventor in Robots Have No Tails (1952). Such subsidiary characters as Trent and Donna, who offer their Wyoming home as refuge, are likewise fully enfleshed. And Tippet, the alien butterfly who speaks with the humans as representative of his race, has his own idiosyncratic charm.
Like Steven Gould in his Wildside (1996) and John Ford in his The Last Hot Time (2000), Oltion is part of a generation of writers who have been raised on classic SF and become determined to honor all the old tropes and sensations in a manner both retro and fresh. There is nothing false or smarmy in this book, but only some good old-fashioned exhilaration about the wonders of technology and the heights to which the human spirit can ascend. In fact, the book most closely allied to Oltion's is nothing less than Doc Smith's The Skylark of Space (1928), whose protagonists likewise convey the sheer can-do spirit found in this enjoyable novel.
