Grimspace by Ann Aguirre
I picked this up at the library because it was regular paperback sized. I truly expected nothing, but was rewarded for my moment of whimsy.
The story borders on the incoherent at times, but it’s fun. My only real complaints are that the flow of time feels incredibly halfassed in parts, causing the relationships between characters to have a very accelerated feeling, and there’s a couple moments where she tries to batter you with sentiments that have only formed in the crudest manner. An example. One of the crew she ends up with is an alien, who looks very human, and it turns out that his race was rendered incapable of aggression, by humans during a conflict, which, for some reason, caused us to build up this system of master and slave wherein each of them is basically adopted by a human. It’s a pretty weak concept already, but whatever, I’ve let Star Trek get away with worse. The thing that got me was this sequence where she saves his life, becoming his de-facto (is that supposed to be hyphenated??) master, then basically orders him to do whatever he wants, then he dies, choosing to save the pilot’s life. Yes, very touching. Except we never get to know anything about him beyond this stupid story point, which is there SOLELY to add a sap layer. There’s about 5 lines of interaction between him and anyone, all of them sort of vapid or bitchy. That one was the worst. What made it extra bad is that it came on the heels of another one, which I’ll go ahead and tell you about. They picked up this alien baby, from an amphibian race, and it nursed on this synthesized feed goo pasted onto people’s chests. It was cute, added the possibility for some warmth, even toed into that warmth a smidge, but wasn’t overbearing, wasn’t a look at me monkey. Then an evil scientist, which has the baby at that point, shoots the pilot with a disruptor beam, aka the turn that into meatloaf ray, hitting him in the arm. The heroine tussles with him, getting the gun, then… blasts him in the chest, doing lord knows what to the baby alien. At this point she left my mind as a hero in the rough, launching herself in that much lauded territory of being The Retarded Bitch What Shot A Baby. Seriously now, there was no reason to not shoot the bad guy in the head, pelvis, stomach, legs even, or whatever. It was an obviously calculated move to allow her to whinge about how she’s a terrible bigot and whatever. She isn’t, she’s just stupid, which is kind of worse, and sort of shadowed the character, for me, the entire rest of the story.
Don’t let those negatives throw you, however, not everything can be gold, especially on a first novel, and the book definitely has merit. The characters aren’t groundbreaking, but they’re fairly well done, and the central character is caustic, flawed, and self aware enough to be interesting. Plus the overall universe is good. I’d have to say it feels like a warm-up to what should be a great sequel.
Huh. Apparently there’s already a sequel. Let’s hope she doesn’t feel so rushed this time.