Dr Brookllyn Jens (Llyn for short) is the rescue co-ordination specialist on the Core General-affiliated medical vessel I Race to Seek the Living. The current mission: Big Rock Candy Mountain, a very old generation ship, has been found hurtling through space at high speed in the wrong location and the wrong direction. Its crew was placed in rickety frozen hibernation by an insane captain and a buxom AI named Helen Alloy (a pun, apparently, on Helen of Troy). Helen has spent the subsequent lonely years upcycling the ship into new components for an intelligent machine, one that looks as if it is made of Tinkertoys (a colourful, wooden, American equivalent of Meccano). But that might not be the machine of the title: the police-issue exosuit that makes it possible for pain-ridden Llyn to live life as she does is just as important to the plot.
Machine takes place in the same universe as the author’s 2018 novel Ancestral Night, a universe where the White Space that gives this series its name is used to dodge Einstein’s inconvenient speed limits. For the most part this book follows different characters, and readers jumping in at this point are unlikely to feel at a disadvantage, especially if they have read any of James White’s Sector General stories, which are a heavy influence. Like Dr Conway in that series, Llyn loads up her brain with the personalities of alien doctors and has to deal with their unfamiliar feelings. Her colleague Rilriltok is, like Dr Prilicla, a large empathetic insect. When a gruff human authority figure called O’Mara was introduced I wondered whether this was actually an official continuation; in a post-novel note the author describes it as a homage. (She also cites C.J. Cherryh as a big influence on the book.)
That similarity wasn’t a problem for me: I love the Sector General books. If anything it raised my expectations a little too high. For one thing, the Sector General stories were quite short, even the novels, and this story is about 147,000 words long. The first third is exciting and raises many mysteries. Why is the ship there? Why were the people frozen? What’s the Tinkertoy machine and who or what is this embarrassingly busty robot? But it slows down somewhat in the second third, when the crew takes those mysteries back home to Core General and has a good think about them. This is also the point at which I almost went off Llyn. Once she starts talking to Helen and learns about the social attitudes of the frozen people, she becomes a bit smug about how dated their views are. She tells us often how humanity has now been Rightminded, which involves mental reprogramming and copious amounts of drugs.
It wasn’t clear to me whether the extreme regulation of human thought presented in the book is intended to be satirical or utopian – when a man from the past is awoken it feels rather like Captain Kirk among the Vulcans. And would Llyn have been so willing to spend so much time away from her family if she weren’t able to damp down all of those supposedly atavistic negative feelings? Her thought processes, as shown in her first-person narration, seem pretty similar to ours, and being Rightminded sometimes amounts to little more than using more sensitive language. She is extremely critical of the oversexualised design of Helen Alloy, and how badly that reflects upon the engineers who made her, but spends a lot of time dwelling on her looks. One might say the book has its cheesecake and eats it, given how frequently Llyn comments on the AI’s curves and the way they squish up against things.
As events progress, it becomes clear that, although Core General is a medical setting, this is not really the type of science fiction medical mystery some readers might have hoped for. That’s not to say it isn’t entertaining: once things start going seriously wrong at Core General the plot is fairly non-stop until the end. I would have loved this book if, like the same author’s New Amsterdam, there had been five different stories within its pages, instead of just the one, but although it felt drawn-out, it was still pretty good. It all ties up, even if some parts of the overall mystery, once revealed, seem to result from the antagonists having gone about things in the most bafflingly over-complicated way. Whatever readers end up thinking of the answers to the mysteries, the journey to uncover them is replete with thrills, spills and indeed chills, and you can’t help admiring Llyn’s grit and competence. Stephen Theaker ***
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