BLUE SUNRISE
by Gregg R. Overman
In Overman’s SF series starter, the crew of a nascent Mars colony and a lunar pilot struggling with addiction play key roles in a crisis as a fleet of alien ships approaches Earth.
This outer-space epic is set on multiple stages in the year 2061. A Louisianan named Ben Allspot employs his formidable skills as a pilot, doing a job on Earth’s moon to send money back to his estranged family, but everything he does is tainted by his all-consuming addiction to Carbodine—an insidious performance-enhancing narcotic that escapes routine drug testing. The drug is particularly plentiful in the ramshackle corporate complex where he works. On Mars, eight pioneering astronauts arrive on a three-year NASA mission to establish a colonial beachhead. Virtually from the start, an accident tests their problem-solving skills and depletes their resources, forcing them to search for frozen water sources. This, in turn, leads to the discovery of ancient Martian organisms, a scientific milestone that, on Earth, triggers the wrath of a Houston-based fundamentalist Christian church. Meanwhile, deep in the cosmos, a sentient race of “Trees” (creatures that become rooted during a plantlike phase) has risen to staggering intellectual and technological heights. They’ve also become enslaved by weasel-like mammals called the Koombar. When the latter had nearly destroyed themselves with greed, belligerence, and shortsightedness, the merciful Trees violated their noninterference policy to rescue them, but the Koombar betrayed them. Meanwhile, four black, cylindrical, faster-than-light machines have been detected beyond the orbit of Pluto, headed toward Earth.
As all the pieces come together, the pages turn faster. Overman’s keen prose shows a gift for plainspoken but effective description that renders a number of hard–SF concepts into lay terms with plenty of wow factor: “This room was probably once filled with ice. Over time, the ice has sublimed…but it is an uneven process. Small air currents and pockets of dissolved gases and other things would have caused the ice to evaporate faster in some areas than in others. These things sculpted the surface, resulting in what we see now.” At another point, the story addresses the difficulties of working with antimatter. He also succeeds in getting into the heads (and, in the case of the alien space probes, the automated programming) of distinctly different life forms and cultures; the Trees and the Koombar argue their points of view most effectively. That said, the human characters, such as the troubled Allspot, tend to be better developed when they hail from places close to the author’s Mississippi Delta origins; the female characters, in particular, are largely a two-dimensional bunch. Overall, the book is reminiscent of a cinematic space epic by James Cameron or Roland Emmerich in which one gets carried away by the staggering adventure, wonder, and danger of it all—only to realize later how little of it felt fresh and new. Still, the sequel promised by this novel’s ending will be eagerly awaited by readers after they complete this star trek.An often impressive debut of an author in deft control of a mind- and galaxy-spanning SF premise.