2019 science fiction, eighth in the Diving Universe series. A crew of
Fleet misfits is sent on a suicide mission to find out what's
happening in one of the stockpiles of abandoned ships.
This book is over 260,000 words, 700+ pages in print, but it's
one of those rare long fiction books that justifies its length. It's
an interleaved story, of the mission going awry in the past and the
survivors being rescued in the present, and at the same time it takes
a strong look at Fleet traditions and asks: isn't some of this a bit
silly? Why did we leave these fully-armed warships mixed in with our
Scrapyard, given our basic philosophy of never going back?
(Which may simply mean that Rusch is having to deal with the
implications of something that in the original stories was just an
interesting puzzle or a handy excuse for why a weird thing had been
done; but it works.)
It's also something of a character study of Nadim Crowe, who did
something deadly as a child and never managed to recover,
psychologically or in reputation, in his rise to ship's engineer. And
there's the captain; let's face it, a renegade captain with a dubious
past battling his personal demons is the sort of person who's often
written as a hero – and in a different situation, perhaps he might
have been. But not here.
It's all surprisingly satisfying. I enjoy Rusch's writing anyway, but
I liked reading about these people in particular.
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