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Neo-opsis
Review
Hydrogen
Steel
K.A. Bedford,
Edge Publishing
ISBN10:1-894063-20-1
Bedford is an award-winning Australian author, and this is his
third novel for Calgary publisher, Brian Hades (Edge SF). If you’re wondering,
as I did, why an Australian has to send his novels to Canada to get published,
it may be because Hydrogen Steel has something of a Canadian outlook.
Zette McGee is a hard-boiled
police detective who comes out of retirement when an alleged murderer appeals
to her for help. Zette takes the case because the suspect knows more about
Zette’s own past than she does herself, and with the help of fellow retiree
Gideon, they spend the next 350 pages chasing clues and avoiding escalating
assassination attempts to stop them from uncovering the truth.
That’s not the
Canadian part, though.
Bedford
has created an engaging mystery that keeps the reader turning pages, set
against a future filled, packed – crowded, really – with futuristic tech: nano,
renegade AIs, replicants with identity crises, wormhole space travel, alien
monitors (mostly offstage), skyhooks, terraforming, and brain upgrades — the
lot. Aging SF readers like myself might find it all a little too familiar and
superficial, but younger readers are likely to be blown away by this rapid-fire
assault of the next ‘big idea.’ And to his credit, Bedford manages to avoid the
worst excesses of expository lump, only occasionally pausing the story to
explain this or that technology, or having the characters work through the
implications of some technology that, really, must have been familiar to
citizens living with these systems. Bedford’s hero’s frequent whinging over the
meaning of life in a replicant world is only mildly distracting from the quite
taunt mystery, and such philosophizing will likely fire the imagination of its
intended younger audience. I may prefer the deeper, subtler analysis presented
in Karl Schroeder’s Lady of Mazes or the intricate economics of
Schroeder’s Permanence to the hodgepodge of ideas thrown together in
Bedford’s novels, but it all works well enough as a backdrop to Hydrogen
Steel’s ‘buddy movie’ mystery.
Okay,
still not particularly Canadian. Up to this point, no reason this could not
have been published in the United States, or Australia.
What
distinguishes Bedford’s novel from the dozens of others of its ilk is the very
Canadian ending: When our heroes finally solve the murder and uncover the awful
truth – nobody much cares. Turns out, all that death and destruction and
sacrifice were pretty much irrelevant.
Now
that is an ending that isn’t going to sell to the American mass market
anytime soon. You can sell a conspiracy novel in the States, no problem; you
can even have the conspirators win (did I mention that pretty much everyone on
our side is dead by the end of the book?) — but you cannot have the hero and
her team struggle for 350 pages, only to be handed the solution in the last ten
pages by a bystander with a, “Oh, is this what you were looking for?” shrug.
American readers expect their protagonists to confront and overcome some
problem through dint of their own heroic efforts – being handed the solution by
someone else and discovering that it was all a huge waste of time is simply not
on.
I
fully expect American reviewers to pan the ending, but like the editors at
Edge, the novel kind of appealed to the Canadian in me. Given that our national
character is defined by our identity crises and our sense that our efforts will
always be overshadowed by the machinations of the overwhelming power to the
South, the dominant themes of Hydrogen Steel hold a kind of resonance
for us. So, all things considered, Hydrogen Steel is a decent
juvenile mystery adventure, well worth a read.
Review by Robert
Runté.
Originally in Neo-opsis # 12.
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