Friday, November 24, 2017

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Barbary Station by R.E. Stearns




Few Books might have a basic plot concept as appealing as Barbary Station:  "A pair of Lesbian Engineers hijack a ship in order to join a band of famous pirates at a space station, only to find themselves forced to contend with a murderous A.I."  You got Engineers!  Space Pirates!  AIs!  Hacking! This just sounds like it should be a fun and exciting adventure.  And the story even starts off with a bang - the aforementioned hijacking occurs and is completed within the first two chapters.

Unfortunately, Barbary Station, which is author R.E. Stearns' first novel, fails to synthesize all of these ideas together and the result feels very much like an unsatisfying mess.  There's clearly a lot of interesting potential ideas here, but many of them are raised and never followed up on, and the direction the plot takes just isn't particularly satisfying either due to a pair of main characters who don't quite gel. 

More detail on this after the jump:

------------------------------------------------Plot Summary---------------------------------------------------------
Adda and Iridian are a pair of newly minted engineers and lovers who are desperate for work.  Iridian is an ex-soldier who is a mechanical engineer while Adda is an engineer specializing in Artificial Intelligences - she uses a hallucinogenic drug plus a data implant to hack in and manipulate AI and other computer systems.   Adda's brother Pel is apparently a member of an infamous Pirate crew based out of the space station known as "Barbary Station" so they hatch a plot:  They'll use their engineering talents to steal a colony ship and deliver it to the pirates to demonstrate that they deserve to join the pirate's crew, which is reputed to live a life of luxury.

But when they arrive at the station, Adda and Iridian are surprised to find the Pirates aren't living a life in luxury at Barbary Station - no instead, the Pirates are basically trapped in the station by the Station's Security AI, which has gone rogue and tries to kill most (though not all) of the station's inhabitants.  And now that Adda and Iridian are on the station - they're trapped too, and the Pirates aren't exactly in good moods.  So Adda and Iridian agree to the Pirate Captain's order - they will find a way to stop the destructive AI and save all of their lives and thus prove their worth to the crew.

But the Security AI is far more complicated than Adda has ever dealt with and Iridian's soldier background has several of the Pirates seeming to want her dead - can the two of them actually accomplish this and stay alive?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Barbary Station has a LOT of ideas, many of which seem interesting at first.  You have Adda's drug-induced workspace by which she hacks into the AI; Iridian's high-tech Shield which she can deploy to defend against nearly any weapon; the questions of the morality of eliminating an active Artificial Intelligence; the need to defend innocents vs protecting one's self; conflicts between former military members from opposite sides of a civil war.....I'm pretty sure I'm missing some here (and some of these ideas would be spoilers).  The story alternates each chapter between Adda and Iridian's point of views, and after a rough start of doing so (more on that below), the two POVs become pretty distinct and show off each of the duo's individual talents quite nicely.  This is a pretty ambitious novel, especially for a first novel, and tries to juggle a lot of plot elements.

Unfortunately, the book fails to really handle these ideas effectively - several of the ones I mentioned above don't result in anything different happening - a major sin in my eyes - these aren't just red herrings, these are potentially major issues that the book brings up and then never does anything with (the AI morality and issues between soldiers being two prominent examples).  Adda's hallucinatory hacking is an interesting concept in theory, but after a while it just feels like magic gibberish that allows Adda to hack into areas when the plot feels it appropriate and not to do so when it wouldn't make for good drama for her to do so.  There's no reason this hacking method couldn't have been exchanged in the book for a conventional hacking ability - the method adds nothing to the book.  Iridian is wounded several times in the final push to disable the AI, and yet none of the wounds really mean anything.

Perhaps even more disappointing is that the relationship between the main duo really did NOT work at all.  The story starts out with Adda and Iridian being lovers and their love for each other is constant throughout the story.  The problem is that the two characters are very much opposites - Adda is an introvert uncomfortable with people while Iridian is very sociable, for one example - and the plot tends to keep the two of them away from each other in their actions (Adda tends to be in a drug-trance-hacking while Iridian is somewhere else doing physical action).  The end result is that while the reader is told repeatedly how much they love each other, we never actually see what exactly it is that each of the duo sees in each other whatsoever.  I'm not saying that the story needs flashbacks (or to start earlier) to show us how the relationship began, but it really needed to show us the basis for that love in their actions now since the relationship is such a big part of the book, and it really didn't.  For comparison, the relationship between Adda and her brother Pel is pretty clearly sketched out by the book, while the more important romance is not.

Finally, the descriptions in the book aren't quite great, particularly in Iridian's later action packed sequences near the end.  The book alternates each chapter between Adda and Iridian's POVs, but the first few chapters aren't quite clear about that (as both characters are in the same location and there's no indication at start of chapter who we're reading about) and so some pronoun confusion early is a bit irritating.  But probably worse is that I found it often hard to follow some of the action sequences of Iridian in her final push to take down the AI.  And well, there's very little happening in these sequences OTHER than the action, which is a problem.  This is not a book focused on character relationships, especially near the end, and for the action to be a little hard to decipher is thus a major problem.

I don't like to give bad reviews, I really don't.  But Barbary Station squanders the potential of its great plot concept and I cannot recommend it.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)