1991 SF, first in a series. "Star" Svensdotter is in charge of getting
the American Alliance's first O'Neill colony ready for commissioning.
Terrorists, bureaucrats and a potential military takeover will get in
the way.
Stabenow is better known for her modern detective series set in
Alaska, but this was where she started, and it's interestingly skewed
out of time: space boosterism of the "let's build huge space colonies"
school tends to fit more in the 1970s and early 1980s, before it
became clear to everybody that the Shuttle was all anyone was going to
get. So how do we get from here to there? In 1992, a deep-space probe
caught an unambiguously alien radio signal; and through a combination
of "be ready to meet them" and "be ready to fight them off", space
development was suddenly a top priority again.
[…] the American Alliance handed a blank check to the newly created
Department of Space and told them to solve the fallout problem in
the Orion's exhaust and get it operational as in yesterday. They
did.
It's also suggested that the habitat's farms will help solve hunger on
Eartth (which is why the government is paying for it), and presumably
eventually the polluting industries that are making hunger on Earth a
thing will also get moved away. In my defence, back when I fell for
this sort of thing it was harder to get good numbers.
More interestingly we have a lot of the space-libertarian-freedom
memeplex, but in fact life in the habitat is and looks as though it's
going to be thoroughly regimented: you're told where you live, if your
job ends you're shipped back to Earth, oh and there's only local law
so a one-way trip to the nearest airlock could definitely be in your
future. But of course that's only if you're a bad person, and it would
be entirely unreasonable for anyone to object.
So all that is why I have trouble enjoying this book as much
as I did when I first read it. But the rest of it is good fun; Star
has to break in a new chief of security, solve various construction
and personnel problems, and deal with a campaign of deniable sabotage
by the military. There is perhaps too much space tourism and
infodumping, I wouldn't mind a little more nuance to the characters,
and the romantic lead… is perhaps a type that some women liked in
1992, but mutual insta-lust or not, the workplace is not the right
venue for aggressive flirtation.
So I enjoyed this re-read, but I'm not recommending it the way I might
have when I first met it.