1991 SF, second of its series. "Star" Svensdotter, having finished
supervising the construction of the first L5 habitat, is now taking a
small fleet to the Belt to try to secure a more reliable supply of
materials for the second.
And of course a lot of this is by-the-book space boosterism.
Nobody has any trouble manufacturing anything from raw materials.
Capitalism solves everything, including the provision of a hospital
(which the big mining companies already operating in the Belt didn't
bother to do) and nobody is ever too poor for the necessities.
(There's a brothel, and apparently everyone working there is happy to
be doing it.)
But what I am going to complain about isn't that but the astrography.
Even though Stabenow acknowledges that the asteroid belt is a large
volume incorporating many bodies with very diverse orbits, places that
are near each other manage somehow to stay just as near even over
several years of narrative, while planets are a long way off (in time
and fuel). Jerry Pournelle (!) demolished this idea with "Those Pesky
Belters and Their Torchships" in 1974: if you have ships good enough
to get around the belt in reasonable time, they can spend only a tiny
bit more time (and sometimes less) getting to Earth or Mars instead.
But anyway. Most of this is competence porn, with our heroes able to
think of things that nobody else has thought of and casually put them
into operation (including a power plant that produces "eleven thousand
kilowatts per 24-hour period"). Also raising a child doesn't slow them
down in the slightest. There's a brief consideration of "how much
freedom is too much" when someone's doing something Our Heroes don't
like, which ultimately leads to a tragedy and another near-death—and
that's solid psychological realism, well-observed and fascinating.
Unfortunately that's not most of the book.
I can't love it. It's pleasing to read if one can turn off one's
critical faculties, particularly any knowledge of physics (see above)
and economics (if gold is so much per gramme now, do you really think
it's still going to be that price when you park a thousand tons of it
in Earth orbit?)—but that's hard work for me. At least this
implausible future is populated with some approximation of real
people.
- Posted by ashley pollard at
09:01am on
15 January 2025
When I read this I misread the authors name as Stab me now,probably because I read Just Stab Me Now by Jill Bearup over the Christmas period.
That and the fact I'm up to my eyeballs in painkillers dealing with shingles.
Oh yeah, I went to the Amazon page where she reports her first book sank without a trace, but apparently has written a whole bunch of non-SF books.
Arguably, which only goes to show, that if science is not your thing, then writing SF without understanding things like orbital mechanics is harder than it looks. I guess? I ramble.
Happy new year. I hope it started better than mine.
- Posted by RogerBW at
09:49am on
15 January 2025
Indeed, I've read several of Stabenow's Kate Shugak mysteries (mostly before I started blogging).
I have no information, but speculate, that Stabenow was hanging around with the sort of enthusiast who took this stuff on trust (which, honestly, could have been a US version of me in those days) and was more interested in telling a post-Heinlein "yay, space" story along the lines of the sort of thing Pournelle and others were writing than in doing the research and having to say "er, guys, this assumption doesn't actually work".
Hope things get less painful soon.