The Spare Man by by Mary Robinette Kowal, a review

We have a nightly routine at our house. My wife tends to go to bed before I do, and every night I read to her as she is getting ready for bed. For my birthday this year my wife bought me The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal, and I started to read it. I had only gotten a couple of pages in when I thought, “this needs to be a night time reading book.” I knew my wife would like it, because I instantly recognized it as a bit of an homage to one of our favorite movie series. The title should have been a dead giveaway: The Spare Man. While not actually trying to do impressions of Myrna Loy and William Powell, while I was reading, I did try to channel their energy. And if you haven’t yet figured out what movie series I am talking about, I suggest you google William Powell and Myrna Loy, then watch the films!

Our protagonist is Tesla Crane a rich and famous roboticist who is on her honeymoon with her new spouse Shal who is a retired detective. Their honeymoon trip is on a cruise ship to Mars. Of course, there is a murder, or two, or three. Her husband is even considered a suspect by the incompetent security chief. Whereupon we meet Tesla’s lawyer, Fantine. Fantine is someone you want on your side in a fight. A tooth-and-nail legal pugilist who is not afraid to insult, threaten, and bully people being mean to her clients, and she does it in the most amusing way. Unfortunately, Fantine is frustrated by the time lag it takes to send and retrieve messages from Earth to halfway to Mars.

The thing that handicaps Tesla is . . . her handicap. As a result of a robotics experiment gone awry that happened several years before, Tesla is in constant pain from numerous back surgeries. And while she has an implant that can dial down the pain, if she dials it down too far she risks doing further damage to her back by not realizing she is doing further damage. She is helped by her service dog Gimlet. Gimlet is adored by almost all who meet her. Tesla is also hampered by the fact that she is a celebrity and is often mobbed by fans.

A rich field of side characters (potential suspects) rounds out the story. Each has enough backstory to make them interesting and make us suspicious. Part of the fun (for us, not Tesla) is trying to figure out who to trust.

Mary Robinette Kowal is an author that I have come to love over the past few years. Take away the science fiction aspect of this story and what you have is a perfectly good murder mystery that is just plain fun.

Star Liner

Comments

Empathy

Websters defines Empathy as: “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another.” Empathy is what makes us human, though lord knows there are many humans who don’t seem to have any. A person without empathy is like a caveman, only concerned for himself. Selfish. It is a lack of community and by extension, a lack of the need for civilization. The person who lacks empathy can have a bit of community, but only with others exactly like himself. It seems like societies go through cycles of empathy and less empathy. Sometimes a single event can change the course of society. Prior to America’s involvement in WWII, the general feeling in America was not very empathetic. We had our own problems. We were still dealing with the lingering effects of the Great Depression, and had been for years. That kind of stress makes it hard to think of others. Hitler was slashing through Europe. He and his fol...

All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu

My first experience with cyberpunk as a genre of science fiction was Neuromancer by William Gibson. Neuromancer was one of the early works that defined the cyberpunk genre. It was insanely influential. It won the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award. But for me, it just did not resonate. I had a hard time visualizing the concepts. It left a bad taste in my mouth for cyberpunk. I mostly avoided the genre. Then a couple of years ago I read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson which is cyberpunk (although some people say it is a parody of cyberpunk). Whatever, I liked it. I recently picked up All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu and it immediately became apparent to me that this was cyberpunk. Julia Z is the main character, and I think this is going to be the start of a series following her. She is a hacker (hence cyberpunk). She has got herself in trouble and so she lives on the margins, barely making it. Then a lawyer asks her for her help. His wife has been kidnapped. The ...

Polar Bears and Entropy

Extinction is a normal part of the evolution of life on our planet. You and I and all individual organisms eventually die. That is the way of things. Entropy happens. Entropy is a word from the third law of thermodynamics that basically means: things fall apart. The natural tendency is for things to become less orderly as time goes on: things break down, things erode, things rust, things wear out. Entropy is a measurement of how fast that is happening in any given system. Individual death is a natural outcome of entropy. But an extinction is where all the members of a species are no longer living. Millions of species have gone extinct over the lifetime of our planet. There are natural background extinctions that happen continually. But sometimes there are events that trigger mass extinctions, where vast masses of species go extinct all at once (all at once in geologic terms, which might mean over the course of hundreds of years). There have been 5 mass extinctions over ...

A speculative mind

Search This Blog