Terraforming framed as a whodunnit

It would be hard for a story about terraforming Pluto to avoid the shadow of Kim Stanley Robinson works like the Mars books, Icehenge, or The Memory of Whiteness. What Lucy Kissick wisely does to distinguish her story is focus the scope by using the conventions of a whodunnit: a tangle of mysteries; a curious focaliser who works past misunderstandings, interspersed with flashbacks and unfolding pictures from other characters’ perspectives; a couple of shell games to obscure the hidden plot; and a denouement neatly explaining it all after a fairly gripping climax.
It’s refreshing to see this territory (and these landscapes) addressed in a novel way (even for a fan of Robinson’s broad sociological stuff), and something about the tight horizons of the setting suggest the tension of worlds small enough that awesome cosmic stories become personal ones.

Not all of that works smoothly: there were moments when authorial self-insert character Lucian’s obsession with a specific band and YA fantasy series stand out as kind of bare sketches of a future pop culture, and once could imagine the rapid-fire banter of pop references Charles Stross would have other characters mention to provide more context. And, while the landscape descriptions are sometimes poetically beautiful, things like the layout of the base or the actual shape of the planes flying in Pluto’s thin atmosphere are hard enough to picture at times that you realise they were under-described. It also takes a little commitment to ride out the protagonist’s bland sentimentality to the interesting emotional beats.

But Kissick’s novel angle of approach pays off, blending compassionate accounts of flawed characters responding to traumas, sense-of-wonder, and novel perspectives on human responses to the alien. It’s rewarding stuff, and I’d be keen for more by the same author.

Toby Longworth does good work performing the various characters, though it’s unfortunate that the mentor and love interest characters are harder to distinguish in any given scene than one would like.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!