or 
.The Meat
This book inspired me to coin a new term: spacemance!
Yes, that's right, a quasi-interspecies romantic saga taking place in space. As
the only known representative of this new sub-subgenre, Fortune's Pawn was
actually pretty great, on both the space/sci fi side and the interstellar
romance side of things.
Despite having caught a terminal case of
romance years and years ago (love that won't end until I'm dead, and who knows?
Maybe not even then!), I preferred the tough battle armor mercenary side of spunky
protagonist Devi Morris's personality to the gushy mushy kissing (etc.) stuff.
That isn't to say that the love story between Devi and Rupert is poorly done,
per se; it's more a compliment to the space stuff, especially the thought of
battle armor being to future combat and gender equality what the Colt revolver
was supposed to be between women and men: the great equalizer. It's just plain
awesome to have a girl smacking sense into big tough men, and it's a situation
that's more believable when we're talking about some amazing combat armor
rather than five minutes of karate lessons in the backyard (I'm thinking of
you, Buffy/Sarah Michelle Gellar! Try raising your leg more than six inches off
the floor when you deliver a "powerful" roundhouse kick next time!).
Rachel Bach is a talented writer, there's no
doubt about it—she spins together a story of a world very different from our
own in some important ways, yet it all somehow works. Partly this because she
adroitly avoids the exposition trap, i.e. the compulsive need to explain any
unfamiliar technology in a ham-handed way; instead, she lets the uses and
dangers of each such technology speak for themselves over the course of the
story. After all, this isn't hard science fiction: readers would probably be
unfazed to learn that this or that technology (hyperdrives, for example) are
impossible according to all known laws of physics. That's not really the point.
Through the first-person narration (which
brings us such priceless internal monologue one-liners as "Arguing with
him was like arguing with a dead apple tree—fruitless"), we get a very
clear idea about the motivations—and desires—of Devi, a great spacemance
character if ever there was one. She's got plenty of pluck, and whenever she
finds herself in over her head, she just punches someone else into the shape of
a flotation device (so to speak).
The romance side of things is almost a
let-down after all that coolness. Stuck on a small space-faring vessel with an
ornery captain, his sister-in-law, a meatheaded fellow merc/character foil, a
dreamy hippy, a catatonic teenager, Big Bird (because the navigator is
literally a large avian), a carnivorous reptilian life form, and a mysterious,
dashingly handsome uber-cool cook slash spy type harboring a deadly secret, it
doesn't exactly come as a surprise who she picks to fall head over heels over;
the surprise is that she goes all gushy in the first place. It feels like she's
being subordinated into what the T-101 humorlessly referred to in Terminator 3
as a "human pair bonding". Why can't the story just be about her
kicking her enemies into dust?
And worse yet, why does the man have to be
totally more powerful and dangerous, in the end, than the woman? Put
differently, why does every romance have to be about a weaker girl and an Edward
Cullen type, where it becomes about his awesome self-control in not ripping her
to shreds or whatever? I won't deny that it was an exciting pairing—tough girl
meets exotic eye candy who is more than he seems—but I would've been totally
fine with a spacemance story without the mance, if you see what I mean.
That said, Fortune's Pawn was a real
page-turner and I, for one, am very much looking forward to book two, and a
continuation of Devi's adventures!
The Math
Baseline
assessment: 7/10
Bonuses:
+1 for Devi being one of the most compelling heroines ever, what Ripley
would've been if she'd been a professional soldier, +1 for dodging the
exposition trap
Penalties:
-1 for limiting Devi's coolness by subordinating her into a love affair with a quasi-supernatural
man/being who makes her considerable abilities look pitiful in comparison
Nerd
coefficient: 8/10 Well worth your time and attention!
Note:
don't think of this score as a B-; instead, think of it as showing that Fortune's
Pawn is better than 80% of all books! You see, we score on a bell curve, with
very few books getting a 2 or 3 and very few an 8 or 9 (and as for 1s and 10s,
practically none!).
