2018 SF, second of an ongoing series. Jake Stewart messes up an easy
job and gets drafted as prison labour…
It's not fair of me to dislike this series for not being what I
wanted it to be. It's a reasonably competent story of a good-hearted
but useless hero muddling through. But it was suggested, right there
in the title and the series name ("Adventures of a Jump Space
Accountant"), that this would be, well, at least slightly about
finance in space.
The world that's our setting was part of the galactic empire until the
ships suddenly stopped coming, 90-odd years ago. They don't have the
full tech base but they're surviving by cobbling things together. One
smart person, as far as we can tell one of two people in the entire
system to have thought of this, notices that production of some key
minerals is dropping, and arranges a mission to go out and buy them up
before anyone else notices. Is he doing this to have a reserve when
everyone else's stocks have run out, so that life among the space
stations round this borderline world can carry on at all? Nope, he
turns right round and sells once the price has gone up a bit. Hope you
like breathing money, Mr Dashi. (Who is meant to be the sort of
super-competent spymaster who's always playing six moves ahead…)
And our hero Jake Stewart is back. In book one he prospered (when he
did) both by having grown up on a small station and knowing a lot
about life-supporting technologies, and by having a solid natural
talent for data analysis and spotting trends and outliers. This time
there is no data analysis, and it's all about the gosh-darn small town
background. Not even any orbital claims adjustment, just a good
old-fashioned cornering the market.
So he gets sent out on a very simple job (go to bar, make contact with
particular person, receive a data chip from him, leave) and screws it
up, because apparently that good old home-town upbringing didn't equip
him for not getting plastered and starting a fight the instant he's at
a bar with an expense account. And it's clear that Mr Dashi expected
this, indeed relied on it, because in this ultra-capitalist world
nobody seems to have friends; they just have underlings, some of whom
are useful and therefore valuable. (Every relationship in the first
book was a power relationship too, but in the space merchant academy
setting it was a bit less obvious.)
Jake is still a babbling wreck the moment he sees any vaguely
attractive woman (I assume; there are only two women in the book, both
of whom just happen to be eye-meltingly gorgeous to his
perceptions). He still screws up everything he's set to do, even the
things he's meant to be vaguely good at. He still muddles through and
fails to spot how everyone is using him.
And the writing just thuds, with trivial repetitions.
They were designed for quick release, and if not, then breakaway.
Jake could throw the lever under tension to release the line, or if
there was too much tension, the thin metal below would split, saving
the ship's hull.
And fundamental errors. In a spaceship with the air circulation turned
off:
Normally you don't die from lack of oxygen but rather an excess of
carbon monoxide.
Dioxide, old chap, unless you have a charcoal stove or something in
the compartment with you. If you didn't want to take ten seconds to
look it up on Wikipedia, there are literally millions of people who
could have told you this, but you never thought to ask, did you?
I stuck with book one because of the forensic accountancy, but there's
none of that here. I may eventually read another but I have lost all
enthusiasm for the series.