“I don’t have a plan. But now I have a goal. The plan I just have to make up as I go along.”
Loretta signed and leaned back, rolling her eyes so hard I thought she might detach her retinas. “Of course. Why did I even get my hopes up? Imagine a star pilot being capable of foresight.”
Yahtzee Croshaw takes us back to the universe of heroic space pilots and villainous space pirates…just after the point where the Quantunneling technology made space travel obsolete and put everyone out of a job.
The star pilot sometimes known as Dashford Pierce (shh, not so loud, there are creditors everywhere) finished up Book 1 Will Save The Galaxy For Food in a slightly precarious place. Okay let’s just say it: his life sucked. At the start of Book 2 however his life…still sucks. His legal troubles haven’t gone away (and he’s had to spend every bit of his savings dealing with them), there’s still no work for star pilots, he’s homeless and having to sleep in his falling-apart spaceship, and there’s a crime boss out there plotting revenge.
It’s enough to make anyone quit being a star pilot completely. Which is exactly what Dashford has decided to do. Sort of. He’s got one slim chance to join a deep-space exploration team and leave his troubles far, far behind. And wouldn’t you know, an old enemy suddenly offers him an opportunity to make his dream come true if he does just one, very lucrative, extremely dangerous heist. So he says yes.
Looking back on things, that might have been a mistake…
The old enemy who’s setting up the heist is Ms. Warden, the object of the heist is a cryo-chamber containing the last hope to save the original star pilot Robert Blaze, and the owner of the cryo-chamber is none other than Mr. Henderson, the crime boss who wants to kill Dashford in all sorts of interesting ways.
If you’re like me and you’ve read Book 1, you’re probably thinking “WHAT ARE YOU NUTS??!” Working with Warden to pull one over on Henderson was exactly what got Dashford into hot water last time. It’s a horrible, unbelievably bad idea, why on earth wouldn’t Dashford wouldn’t see that?
Except Dashford does see it. And he goes through with it anyway. It all happens so organically that the reader gets taken for the same ride he does, loudly complaining about how badly this is going to go and kicking himself the entire time.
The real problem here is no matter how many times he says he’s done with being a star pilot, he doesn’t take any real steps to actually stop. Other pilots have changed jobs, settled down, maybe even married their arch-nemesis. But not Dashford Pierce. Being a hero is the dream, the goal, the entire point. He’s going to save his personal hero and then make a lateral career move into being the helmsman of corporate spaceship, and if doing something maaaaybe a little illegal (okay, a lot) like teaming up with a couple of hardened space-criminals and taking orders from a woman who throws people under a bus as a way of saying hello will get that done, then he’ll charge into battle and make up a plan as he goes along.
It’s really not a question of if things will go wrong as when.
…there wasn’t much to do besides try to avoid cramping and practice the usual lines.
“You’ll never get away with this,” I muttered to myself, it being the best opener for general purposes. “Do you expect me to talk? You’re insane.” I exercised my cheek muscles and tried some different inflections. “You’re insane. You’re insane!“
Croshaw brings in all the space opera tropes here and skewers them mercilessly, mashing sci-fi fantasy with everyday irritants. The bombastic professional thief who talks about himself in the third person is dealing with family drama and some recent blows to his self-esteem. The mad-scientist who used to turn people into enslaved cyborg drones is part of a support group for former supervillains. Warden’s plan to infiltrate Henderson’s building is to have Dashford impersonate famous author Jacques McKeown (yes, again), and thus he gets to see the absolute worst aspects of celebrity culture in general and a fan convention in particular.
And lest we forget, one of the weirdest tropes of pulp sci-fi is that no one gets hurt too badly, everyone lives to fight another day, and all star pilots follow the unspoken rule that actually killing someone is cheating. So it comes as a nasty shock when it turns out pretty much none of that is true. It gets harder and harder for Dashford to rationalize his actions as things go wrong again. And again. And again.
“I barely even fired! It was more like littering with missiles! They just didn’t dodge! it’s not my fault!”
(Croshaw also makes one of the most effectively frightening supervillains by taking all the stereotypes for what the personality of an all-powerful killing machine would look like, and then using precisely none of them.)
In addition to playing with tropes, the author does interesting things with the technology that pretty much started the star pilots’ problems: the Quantunnel. It’s always been something of a handwave tech; instantaneous travel between two points anywhere in space, yadda yadda yadda. But how might that actually work? What could you do with something like that in a heist? Think of the ways you could play with the tech, with the position of a Quantunnel gate, or the size. And oo, just imagine what could happen if something goes wrong.
“I know someone who ended up looking like one of those forced-perspective drawings being looked at from the wrong angle. The point-three-millimeter thing is just the threshold where that’s never happened.”
“Okay…”
“So far.”
The first book in this series went a long way towards showing us how ultimately childish the entire mythos of star pilots was, but I think it gets even more grim here. The book is still filled with that fantastic biting dialog, ridiculous scenarios, bizarre tech and hilarious moments (I particularly liked the scene where the three-person heist team ends up following each other in lockstep from room to room because they can’t trust each other out of their sight.) But we see even more here about how entire populations – human and otherwise – get discarded because it’s cost effective. Croshaw also has some really timely words about how hard it is to get people to think once they reach the torch-and-pitchfork-mob stage.
…trying to talk down angry fanatics with rational argument is like trying to put out a fire by whipping it with a dry straw.
And Dashford Pierce – who faces maniacal mob bosses, back-stabbing co-conspirators, rabid fans, and an all-powerful galactic evil, and is somehow still his own worst enemy – gets to become even more disillusioned with being a star pilot than he already was. After all, in a lot of ways the only difference to hapless civilians between a supervillain and a space-hero is what they happen to be calling themselves at the time.