Jitterbug by Gareth L Powell
I would like to thank Titan for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review
Publisher – Titan
Published – Out Now
Price – £9.99 paperback £6.99 ebook
On Earth, they depicted justice as blindfolded and impartial, but out here on the frontier, she was red in tooth and claw.”
Jupiter and Saturn are gone, and a mysterious force has built a huge habitable sphere from their ashes. When criminals try to lose themselves on this new frontier, bounty hunters like Copernicus Brown and the crew of his sentient ship Jitterbug get paid to hunt them down.
But when Brown rescues Amber Roth, sole survivor of a pirate attack, the Jitterbug and her crew find themselves the target of powerful political factions who want control of the data chip hidden in Roth’s stomach.
And all the while, something vast and ancient creeps towards them from the depths of space…
The enormity of space is both an opportunity and a challenge for science fiction. The attraction is to expand our minds, but the challenge can be making us believe it. I’ve had a very conflicting read with Gareth L Powell’s new science fiction novel Jitterbug on the one hand I found it an entertaining propulsive read but often I found myself giving the story some thought and finding quite a few things not quite adding up for me.
In the nearish future all the Outer planets up to Mars have been destroyed and turned into a huge set of segmented areas known as the Swirl which has soon become a colonised space thanks to its atmosphere and land suitable for colonisation. With the human race expanding outward in the new look solar system there are also criminals seeking not to be captured. Copernicus Brown and his small crew of the Jitterbug now make a living as bounty hunters. But a tip leads the crew to strange scene of spaceships battling and soon a tragedy places Brown and his crew into the middle of a situation where finally the secrets of the Swirl may be revealed but brown may then find people want his life terminated in the process.
On the one hand there is a strong feel of a light action-adventure yarn. Copernicus is a solid handsome main lead given a personal reason to follow this mystery all the way. The crew is entertaining but special mention has to be given to the Jitterbug’s own AI which has adopts the avatar of a talking parrot which confuses the unwary a lot but has a great deal of ancient perspective on humans. Another main character is the enigmatic Amber Roth who soon falls into the crew’s orbit and is a major clue as to why everything is soon going to hell. Finally, Powell throws in a fascinating ambitious politician in the form of Daniella Lanzo who refreshingly takes very little nonsense and regularly calls people up on theirs. Powell aims for a set of first-person narratives between these characters all giving their slightly different impression of events. The effect is often very breezy and there are some great set pieces skilfully played out combined with a very big reveal explaining the mystery which I admit was unexpected and kept me interested to see how it would eventually turn out. Powell here utilises several big science fictional ideas to move the story out of its initially quite human politics to something far bigger in scale which was a bold approach.
Powell is trying to mix some epic space opera with the breezy rogues with a heart world and then two for me don’t quite come together very well. The Jitterbug’s crew are not experts in any field and yet very quickly are in a galaxy saving position that feels unlikely to work. There is no sufficient levelling up of the crew’s skills and abilities in the 300 pages to make me think yes thing and is actually good enough we just are told to accept it. Powell adds a romantic element to the story line which I disliked both for its speed, following the trope of two people arguing then suddenly kissing with no prior warning and perhaps for me most problematic involves someone whose past actions actually caused the personal disaster that Copernicus is supposedly on but she gets a free pass because she’s attractive? I’m not totally convinced that the human race en masse would conveniently not panic about the destruction of most of the solar system and just settle on the new Swirl elements but apparently, we are told that is human nature. Finally, the first-person sections often have the cast explaining elements of human history and its interactions with the Swirl as long monologues that for me never really fit easily into the chapter. As the story length is short these felt more shoehorned in to replace more natural exposition.
Overall, the feeling I have is that the book is aiming more for a big one-off action movie where speed, special effects and good character actors with a pacy direction can deliver entertainment but in a novel the lack of pauses to allow the story to breath and develop the characters means I felt more off I was questioning myself as to how is that actually going to work? A longer tale or perhaps over more than one book I could feel this would have worked far better. As such I think it is what type of science fiction you’re looking for as to whether you’ll enjoy this but not quite what I enjoy reading.
