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.