Horizons [Hardcover]

Mary Rosenblum's Horizons is a near future SF novel with a somewhat old-fashioned shape and set of concerns. And I liked it for that -- it's very exciting, fast-moving, with some nice speculative elements. And with an engaging heroine. And really nasty bad guys. (Who espouse a philosophy I personally find repellent -- but which many might have at least some sympathy for.)

The heroine is Ahni Huang, daughter of the head of an influential Taiwanese commercial family. In the opening sequence she goes up to the North American Alliance's orbital platform, NYUp, to avenge her brother Xai's murder. But there she learns that Xai is actually alive, and acting against her family. She also discovers a secret on NYUp: a group of apparently illegally modified humans are living in microgravity, under the leadership of Dane Nilsson, the still "normal" chief "gardener" for the orbital.

After a confrontation with her father and mother, who are acting at mysterious cross-purposes, she returns to NYUp. The platform is under increasing tension. There is an independence movement, led by Dane, but it is spiralling out of control, moving too rapidly, apparently as a result of external agitators. Possibly these are controlled by Xai, who may be working with Li Zhen, son of the Chinese leader, and the man in charge of the Chinese orbital platform.

All this moves very rapidly to a confrontation -- the World Council military is pushed to act against the people of NYUp, particularly Dane. So Ahni must figure out who is really behind all these problems, and how or if she can get sufficient cooperation between Dane's allies on NYUp, between an asteroid-based pilot/smuggler, and between Li Zhen to prevent a true disaster from destroying everybody's hopes for the future.

I quite enjoyed the novel. At the same time it has some weaknesses. Notably the resolution of the plot is quite convenient -- it is exactly what we as readers want, but it comes too rapidly, too easily, but also after (I felt) a somewhat implausible raising of the stakes, increasing of the danger to the characters we care about. By which I mean that I think the end state could have been plausibly arrived at, but somewhat more slowly. But that would have been hard to make work novelistically. In the end Horizons is lots of fun, good solid SF -- not a lasting masterpiece but nice work.

Before this book joins the dusty pile beside my bed for future re-reading, I thought I'd put up a very brief review.

Mary Rosenblum has written a book that is more than a salad, more than a slice of pie, it is a main course. I found it complicated enough that it deserved slow reading, chewing, savouring. I will read it again to pick up on things that might have slipped past me as my sleep meds kicked in.

Read it yourself and see what I am talking about. At random points during my day, I imagine myself in the low gravity areas of NYUp and at my tired moments I compare myself to one of her characters being held in gravity that was oppressive.

Go ahead and order it, you need some reading that will stick to your ribs.

I had high hopes for this book. It had a cool setting (space cities tied to earth by space elevators). Political factions fighting for control, space cities trying to establish Independence from earth. Some cool new tech, like morphing materials.

However as I got into the book, the characters just got a bit too sentimental for my taste. The action was slow to develop. I guess I just lost patience with the pace of the story, and the characters weren't interesting enough to hold me.