Book Review: Corsair

Corsair

by James L. Cambias

Tor, 2015

The previous novel from James Cambias, 2014's A Darkling Sea, was a fantastic and genuinely creepy story laid out along the classic sci-fi “first contact” template, and it signaled the appearance of a first-rate talent in the genre book-world. The new book from Cambias, Corsair, is a whiplash-inducing departure from its predecessor, as light as the earlier book was dark, as playful as the earlier book was somber. It's a quick read that feels like it was a quick write.

It's set in 2030, when space-mining has become a booming business on Earth. Businesses pay enormous sums for automated lunar mining vessels to send their cargoes of precious metals into precisely-calculated re-entry orbits designed to splash down within reach of retrieval and processing facilities. But those automated vessels can be hacked and compelled to jettison their cargo into international waters – and so a new kind of space-piracy has been born. And one of the worst scourges of that new incarnation of an old profession is a pirate known only by his hacker name of Captain Black, “the absolute gold-anodized titanium pinnacle of the techno-badass pyramid,” who is in reality 28-year-old David Scwhartz, a lifelong scammer and techno-vandal.Naturally, the United States government is eager to dismantle the operations of space-pirates like Captain Black:

United State Orbital Command had decided to get tough, and lined up diplomatic cover and poll numbers to support the mission. Washington wanted to boost its revived “global cop” credibility going into the 2030 midterm elections, and remind pals like India just who was the senior partner in the alliance. Cracking down on space piracy was popular at home and abroad, and best of all, there'd be no wailing Third World village women or flag-draped coffins in the news feeds.

Spearheading these efforts as Corsair opens is a gung-ho young officer named Elizabeth Santiago (at one point of her superiors reprimands her for being too much of a fighter: “We want evidence leading to prosecution, not shoot-outs in space”), who knew and briefly dated David Schwartz back at MIT years ago. When their first space-encounter allows him to escape victorious, Elizabeth burns with a very different kind of desire: to track him down and bring him to justice.

The fast-paced novel that follows is part thriller and part rom-com, and it all works smoothly and readably mainly due to Cambias' gifts for tight plotting and convincing characters. Even so, it's a weirdly unambitious novel, at times distractingly so. A Darling Sea was engrossingly imagined in every alien detail, but there's none of that world-building on display in Corsair. The action is moved to 2030 solely in order to have space-mining be the plot's MacGuffin; once Cambias has that, he spares not a single thought to any other changes the next fifteen years might bring. Characters still say “WTF” when they're confused; cops are still on the look-out for pot farms; McDonald's is still in business and selling hamburgers; people still vacation in Southern Florida; the Miracle of Science pub in Cambridge is still a hangout for the (literally) unwashed masses of MIT students, and so on, without even a gesture at the possibility that “WTF” will have gone the way of “tarnation,” or that most of Southern Florida will be under water, or that pot will be legal everywhere, or any of the other hundred changes that might happen between now and then. It's an oddly indifferent tone for a science fiction writer to take.

“Don't get predictable” goes David Schwartz's mantra, and certainly there was no way to predict Corsair from A Darkling Sea. And whatever occasional laziness the former might have, that unpredictability is a good thing, especially in a genre so thickly-forested with derivative-ad-nauseam titles. It's nice not knowing what Cambias will bring us next year.