RogerBW's Blog

Mighty Good Road, Melissa Scott 05 May 2025

1990 sf. There are FTL starships, but most travel and freight goes via the instant-transit Cross-Systems Railroad, at least as far as the nearest station to where you need to go. Gwynne Heikki is a salvage operator, but the job turns bad…

The opening paragraphs, as Heikki travels past the memorial to the accident that happened when the operators tried to balance a fifth warp conduit into a crowded system, are thoroughly memorable; so I found myself rather surprised that I remembered absolutely nothing of the rest of the book.

This is particularly odd of me since it does a thing that I often wish more books would do. It's very easy to say "X is a professional, but then the job goes wrong and adventure happens"; but fully two-thirds of this book is about Heikki being a professional, negotiating for a job, hiring a crew and equipment, and in general letting us see how the system works when it does work (albeit with some elements that seem iffy), rather than jumping straight to the part where it's all gone awry and everyone has to run for their lives. It's very welcome.

There is some of that, and corporate shenanigans too, but this is a working society and problems can actually be solved by the people whose job it is to solve them.

There were two elements here that I especially enjoyed: first, the shading of manners and cultures as one moves between the Exchange Points (effectively interstellar railway stations) and the planets that they serve. "Pointers", living in a built environment, tend to the prissy (there's an automated system of fines for bad language), while the planetsiders have their own conflicts, between the first-in colonists who were rough-and-tumble generalists and the second wave corporate specialists who came to exploit the resources that the first wave found.

Second, the information technology is clearly projected from the late 1980s: terminals are still big bulky things rather than something that fits in your pocket, but you carry a "datalens" that can decode a display full of apparent visual noise into what you want to see if you have the right keys. Things still get printed. At the time of publication I think this would have been an interesting if unlikely projection; reading now, it has the feel of a quaint retro-tech, but an enjoyable one.

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  1. Posted by DrBob at 01:49pm on 05 May 2025

    I thought "I must re-read this", then glanced at the shelf and realised it isn't there. Must have loaned it to someone years ago. Ah well, at least The Kindly Ones is still there, and that's my favourite of Scott's.

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