SciFi Novella Review: Red Dust by Yoss (trans. by David Frye)

 





Red Dust by Yoss (trans. by David Frye)


Red Dust is a noir sci-fi detective novel written by Cuban author Yoss, translated from the original spanish by David Frye.  The story is openly written in the style of author Raymond Chandler, with callbacks to a few other writers (Isaac Asimov's R Daneel Olivaw is namechecked) and their works.  This is another story that I first learned about while watching FIYAHCon, and it was freely available from my library, so it was an auto pickup.  

It's a well done sci-fi noir featuring a robot protagonist in space chasing a luck-bending criminal, with little help from the aliens he works for, and there's some solid themes dealing with powerful (colonization sort of) outsiders.  At the same time, it's hardly remarkable, and so unless you're really looking for sci-fi noir fiction, this is fairly skippable.  

Plot Summary:  Raymond is a Pozzie on the space station William S. Burroughs, a robot in the shape of a human who serves the three alien races who control the station as station security.  But when an alien criminal armed with the psionic power to manipulate probability escapes into human space, killing two of his fellow Pozzies, Raymond is chosen to go after the criminal and his associates.  To track them down, Raymond seeks the help of another criminal, the only human known to also be able to manipulate probability.  But Raymond's task may be made impossible by his alien masters' insistence on looking for their own interests first, humans second, and their unwillingness to tell him what he needs to know....

Thoughts:  Red Dust is a very self aware sci-fi noir, with the main protagonist Raymond having read classic detective fiction - and indeed named himself after it - and both he and his criminal partner constantly make references to older texts and 20th century media.  But these references never seem offputting or inappropriate, and the noir narrative of Raymond works generally pretty well.  The story and plot goes pretty well too, so if you like noir you're unlikely to be disappointed with this sci-fi spin on it.  

There's very little mind you super interesting or unique about the story - the most is the geopolitical situation with the three alien races, who run the space station and basically refuse to let humans have advanced tech to get out of the solar system, all the while also doing what's only best for their own species, whether that be restricting information the police would need, or squabbling over trivial matters when a criminal is about to get away.  And then there are the humans who are alien-phobic (and extend that to the Pozzies) and the humans who live on their own badly maintained space station for their own freedom, one not curtailed by the aliens' rules.  But there's not enough done with it to really make this novella special.