2020 space opera, second in its loose series. Dr Brookllyn Jens is a
rescue medic: she jumps out of perfectly good spaceships into broken
ones, and gets the patients out. She's about to enter an ancient
generation ship that is nowhere near where it should be, and that's
the least of the weirdnesses.
I liked the first book, Ancestral Night, but didn't love it,
and didn't seek this out until a trusted friend posted a review
recently. I often found that book stodgy: the individual ideas and
discussions were interesting, but they got repetitive, nut at least to
my taste this does better.
For a start it's a little shorter, but also there's more immediately
happening around the side of the main puzzles, and while there are
certainly breaks to philosophise they are necessarily kept short.
Jens is working on an ambulance ship out of the great hospital at Core
General, and if you're thinking James White, yes, absolutely—and not
the early James White with his 1950s stereotypical gender roles either
(and to do White credit, he did manage to improve later). Bear
acknowledges the influence, and there are other elements here too: an
O'Mara in the hierarchy, and the recorded personalities that are a
quick way to get other-species medical information, as well as their
unfortunate tendency to make the wearer feel that their body is all
wrong.
There are small problems: a standard year is an "an", fair enough, but
Bear betrays her unfamilarity with the system of prefixes used outside
the USA when she makes the century-equivalent a centian (rather than a
hectan). A space is described as "twenty-three cubed meters" (I'm
pretty sure this is meant to be "cubic"). But these are small
problems, and it's only because the rest of the book is so very good
that they manage to irk me.
"Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck," I said, after due consideration.
This book does more explanation of how the Synarche, the overarching
multispecies civilisation-government, works, in part because it has to
be explained to the generation-ship rescuees, but also because we run
up against one of the cases in which it could reasonably be said to
have failed. And there's a solution that simply wouldn't work in a
contemporary setting: nothing done by the bad guys was illegal, but
the law can and will be changed to make sure it doesn't happen again.
And there are the ethics of terrorism, and the library interface
android designed in the shape of a sexy woman who has developed in
ways never intended by any of the various people who may have had a
hand in changing her programming, and a whole host of different things
that could fairly be called "the machine", and…
It's altogether really rather splendid.