In many ways, Starship is the kind of sequel
one hopes for. While so many second novels in series merely rehash what
has come before, this novel stands so completely on its own, and bears
so little resemblance to its predecessor, Signals,
that that book is rendered practically superfluous. Which is just as well,
as Signals wasn't all that great.
Starship has its problems, too, not the least
of which is an abrupt ending that leaves way too many
unresolved plot threads dangling like frayed shoelaces. But even though
it never amounts to much more than a lazy-Sunday space opera potboiler,
it delivers a lot of entertainment on that level. If nothing else, it's
neat to read an alien invasion novel in which we are the alien
invaders.
Starship opens a little over 200 years after
the events in Signals, in which an alien vessel visited our solar
system and then, oddly, turned around and left with little to no fanfare.
A massive generation ship, informally called The Home by its
thousands of inhabitants, is on its way to colonize another world many
light years away. In order to keep its society stable throughout the long
centuries of flight, The Home has developed a nearly Orwellian
system in which dissent and doubt are mellowed by drugs, everyone on board
has a number for a surname (Jason 215, one of the protagonists, is so
called for being born 215 years after the ship's launch), surveillance
is pervasive, and people have become so interbred that almost everyone
on board looks alike. While conditions on The Home might seem
a bit extreme at first glance, I like the way Randle was willing to turn
up his nose at the traditional wide-eyed optimism of most space opera,
and introduce his generation ship (a neat concept that SF has underused,
to its benefit, I think) as a seething hotbed of barely-contained social
turmoil just waiting to boil over.
Boil over it does. When the indispensible agriculture
pods start falling like dominoes to disease and blight, effectively condemning The Home in its entirety, the only explanation appears to be
sabotage. While the ship's captain and the civilian mayor attempt to uncover
the conspiracy, immediate searches are made of nearby space for a suitable
world that can be colonized well ahead of schedule. The only likely candidate
is a moon surrounding a massive gas giant, where the conditions are remarkably
similar to Earth's. But if the moon contains any intelligent life, the
laws of The Home strictly forbid any colonization. Of course,
when those laws were drafted, no one was quite anticipating the desperate
emergency that has actually arisen.
Naturally, there are several assumptions that you'll just
have to let slide — the lucky fact of The Home's being
just close enough to a system with an inhabitable moon, etc. — if
you want the story to work a lot of the time. And while Randle holds your
attention admirably throughout the book while the crisis escalates, he
fails, as he did in the first volume, to bring his tale to a satisfying
conclusion. It's very exciting watching The Home's rigid and
calm society descend into anarchy, terrorism and panic. But an even more
potentially compelling story thread, involving exactly what the colonists
do discover upon landing on the moon, is wrapped up in a hurried fashion,
without being allowed to come a cropper. Presumably this will get more play in book three.
There are signs that the series has room to grow. But in the end, it's destined to be a boilerplate midlist adventure saga in a genre that already
offers readers the worlds of Niven, Pournelle, Anderson, Bujold, Cherryh,
Weber, and on and on. But if you have a lazy afternoon
to kill and are looking for a little new old-school spacefaring adventure
to kill it with, you might find Randle's Starship a reasonably worthwhile flight.
