he time is a spacefaring future, in which Earth's corporate culture has become an even more cutthroat version of today's: Everybody keeps their eyes on the bottom line, measuring each and every life decision on the basis of which social connections, and which professional decisions, best serve their advancement up the corporate ladder.
Caroline Cassandra Williams, who goes by the professional name CC, is a dedicated financial analyst en route to a mining colony on the asteroid Vesta, where she's been sent to investigate irregularities in the company accounts. Her fellow passengers include her rival Jonathan Vinocur Sanderson, "who insisted on being called 'Sandy' by his intimate friends, if he still had any."
CC and Sandy share a mutual loathing born of competition, but subsequent events might reveal him to be more than just another corporate weasel. As for CC, she just wants to do her job, reap the professional rewards and return home to her fiance, David IV, scion of a well-connected family. CC thinks she's in love with the man, but their relationship is clearly low on passion and based more on the social advantages both will reap from the marriage.
Complications ensue when the transport vessel, the Rimrunner, encounters a mysterious fast-moving object in transit. And they continue after the ship arrives on Vesta, an ultra-low-gravity environment where CC survives a number of attempts on her life. Is there a conspiracy? Will she return home to David IV? And what will the aliens have to say when they show up?
Spreadsheet shenanigans in space
No doubt about it, there's fun stuff in Hostile Takeover. CC is a strong character caught up in a cutthroat system, engaged to the wrong guy and pledged to a corporate ladder that, we understand within a very few pages, requires her to live her life as a workaholic intent on advancement for its own sake. It's no wonder that when she gets to Vesta, with its rough-hewn priorities and fewer pretensions, she becomes way more likable, even if it takes her a while to see it.
Some elements rankle. The exposition is extended and dispensed in the form of infodumps. CC spends much of the first 20 pages (two full chapters) on an exercise bicycle, telling herself everything the reader needs to know about the corporate world she comes from, the mission she's been sent on, her engagement to David IV and her adversarial relationship with Sandy. When the time comes to establish, for the reader's benefit, what she looks like, CC obliges the author by helpfully looking in a mirror.
Some of the financial intrigue is grating; to some extent it's meant to be, but it still leaves CC perhaps the only heroine in the history of science fiction who delays seeking cover from a radioactive solar flare so she can run back to her quarters, get online and look up a spreadsheet. Also distracting is Shwartz's habit, in this book at least, of referencing many past works of science fiction: Her characters make far too many jokes involving Star Trek's Vulcans, Battlestar Galactica's Cylons and other touchstones of our shared past. The early
chapters set aboard the Rimrunner, a passenger vessel with little to distinguish it from other fictional spaceships, are not nearly as interesting as those on the much-better-realized Vesta colony.
The story as a whole is interesting in spurts, but it's also fitfully dull. It never seems to move out of low gear, even when CC is dodging arranged "accidents" or involved in a last-minute negotiation with aliens.
