The Explorer / James Smythe

The Explorer
by James Smythe

science fiction ?!

copyright 2012
read in December 2015

rated 5/10: readable, but only if there's nothing else

Here the deep and significant question: It it possible to set a story in a spaceship and the story is *not* science fiction ? James Smythe does his best.

There's a spaceship. There's a time loop, astronauts, an "anomaly" in space... All this has very little to do with the story. I *think* it's a study of people acting in a stressful situation. They may as well be on a boat.

In fact, I suspect that the author would have trouble distinguishing a spaceship from a boat. The science is not bad. It's embarrassing.

The ship's engine is going continuously -- yet there is no trace of "gravity", no drift against acceleration. After weeks of acceleration the engine is stopped. Just a quick squirt of the forward thrusters -- and the ship stops moving ! There is battery-powered artificial gravity -- but it only works when the ship is "stopped".

There's a viewing bubble which allows 360 degree viewing. Sometimes the view is like the view from a garden on Earth... but half the time, space is entirely black.

In order to go as far as possible, fuel has been developed to give maximum thrust from minimum volume of fuel... Then the ship is built with storage rooms that are almost empty, holding spare stocks of items which are rarely used. The chief protagonist is able to sleep in a room which contains just a few crates of supplies. The whole ship is biiiig, and spacioooooous. And the crew spend almost all of their time in one room at the front.

So the science is rubbish. That's distracting, but not a serious problem.

I read the first chapter or so and think, everyone's dying, this'll be a short book. Then we hit the time loop and I think, this is boring, makes it seem like a very long book. Then I accept that it's not science fiction, it's a character study, and I think, this is still boring but I want to find out how it ends.

Then the protagonist escapes the time loop and I think, no he can't, to do that he must be in the time loop so if he has just escaped from the time loop then he's not in the time loop so he can't escape from it... And the story ends. With no further explanation. Because the characters have been studied and that's that. It's not as if it's science fiction, is it.

Having written that last paragraph I went back and revised my rating, from six to five.

There are interesting ideas in this book. The commercialisation of space flight. Reasons and expectations of crew and sponsors. The gradual explanation of the deaths of various crew members.

It's a character study set in a spaceship. I reach the end of the book and think, interesting characters, though overall depressing. Okay, I suppose, if all you want is a book which analyses the characters.

Science fiction is supposed to be, What if ? This book is more, So what.

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"A city without trees is not fit for a dog"... per Ginger Meggs