Review: Barbary Station, by R.E. Stearns

[Russ Allbery]

Barbary Station
by R.E. Stearns

Series:    Barbary Station #1
Publisher: Saga
Copyright: October 2017
ISBN:      1-4814-7688-2
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     448

Adda and Iridian are newly-graduated engineers who, as the book opens,
are hijacking a colony ship to deliver it to a notorious group of
pirates. Adda is the computer expert: dyed hair, neural implants, and
the sort of high-tech gear required to subsume computer systems.
Iridian is a former soldier, a Shieldrunner to be specific. They
graduated into an awful economy following a secessionist war between
Earth and the outer system and have spent much of their adult lives
trying to keep their heads above water financially. This is Adda's
scheme to get them enough money to live comfortably and, more
importantly, together: hijack a colony ship, eject the passengers, and
deliver the rest to the most successful pirate gang in the system.

This plan goes surprisingly well right up to the point where they
arrive at Barbary Station. There, they discover that the pirates
everyone believes are living in luxury in a former ship-breaking
station are, instead, prisoners in a cobbled-together emergency shelter
attached to the side of a station they can't safely enter. The pirates
don't control Barbary Station. A malicious AI does, and it's trying
very hard to kill them.

You can tell that this book was written in 2017 by the fact that a
college education in engineering is only financially useful as a
stepping point to piracy and crime. I can't imagine an author more than
20 or 30 years ago writing about economically desperate STEM college
graduates, and yet it now seems depressingly plausible.

James Nicoll's appreciation for this story was derailed early by the
total lack of attention the main characters give to the hapless
passengers of the colony ship who get abandoned in deep space. I'm
forced to admit that I barely noticed that, probably because the story
seemed to barely notice it. Adda and Iridian do show some care for
ordinary civilians stuck in the line of fire later in the book, but
they primarily see the world in terms of allies and opportunities
rather than solidarity among the victims. To be fair to them, their
future is a grim, corporate-controlled oligarchy that is entirely
uninterested in teaching such luxuries as empathy.

Despite some interesting examination of AI systems and the interaction
of logic between security and environmental controls, Barbary Station
is not really about its world-building or science-fiction background.
If you try to read it as that sort of book, you will probably be
frustrated by unanswered, and even unasked, questions. The plot is more
thriller than idea exploration: can the heroines make allies, subvert a
malicious AI, figure out what really happened on the station, and stay
alive long enough for any of the answers to matter? There are a lot of
bloody fights, an escalating series of terrifying ways in which an AI
can try to kill unwanted parasites, and the constant danger that their
erstwhile allies will suddenly decide they've outlived their
usefulness.

As long as what you want is a thriller, though, this is an enjoyable
one, although not exceptional. It has the occasional writing problem
that I'll attribute to first novel: I got very tired of the phrase "the
cold and the dark," for example, and the set pieces in the crumbling
decks of a badly damaged space station were less epic than I would have
wished because I struggled to visualize them. But the tension builds
satisfyingly, the sides and factions on the station are entertainingly
complex, and the resolution of the AI plot was appropriately creepy and
inhuman. This AI felt like a computer with complex programming, not
like a human, and that's hard to pull off.

This is also a book in which one of the protagonists is a computer
hacker, and I was never tempted to throw it at a wall. The computers
acted basically like computers within the conceit of neural implants
that force metaphorical mental models instead of code. For me, that's a
high bar to meet.

What Barbary Station does best is show a mixed working partnership. On
the surface, Adda and Iridian fall into the brains and brawn
stereotypes, but Stearns takes their relationship much deeper than
that. Adda is nervous, distant, skittish, and needs her time alone to
concentrate. She's comfortable in her own space with her thoughts.
Iridian may be the muscle, but she's also the gregarious and outgoing
one who inspires trust and loves being around people. While Adda works
out the parameters of the pirates' AI problem, Iridian is making
friends, identifying grudges and suspicions, and figuring out how to
cross faction boundaries. And Adda and Iridian know each other well,
understand each other's strengths and weaknesses, and fill in each
other's gaps with unconscious ease. Books with this type of partnership
protagonist told in alternating viewpoints aren't unheard of, but they
aren't common, and I think Stearns did it very well. (I did find myself
wishing the chapters would advertise the protagonist of that chapter,
though, particularly when picking this book up after a reading break.)

Barbary Station felt like what military SF could be if it were willing
to consider more varied human motivations than duty and honor, allow
lesbian partners as protagonists, and use suspicious criminals instead
of military units as the organizational structure. It has a similar
focus on the technical hardware, immediate survival problems, the
dangers of space, physical feats of heroism, and navigating factions in
violent, hierarchical organizations. Characterization gets deeper and
more satisfying as the book goes on, and there are a few moments of
human connection that I found surprisingly moving. It's not entirely
the book I wanted, it takes a while to get going, and I don't think the
world background quite hung together, but by the end of the book I was
having a hard time putting it down.

If you're in the mood for a desperate fight against malicious
automation in an abandoned deep space structure, and can tolerate some
world-building gaps, repetitive wording, and some odd failures of
empathy, you could definitely do worse.

This is a mostly self-contained story, but there were enough hooks for
a sequel that I was unsurprised to see that it will be followed by
Mutiny at Vesta.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Reviewed: 2017-12-31

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>