- Kroese, Robert.
Starship Grifters.
Seattle: 47North, 2014.
ISBN 978-1-4778-1848-0.
-
This is the funniest science fiction novel I have read in quite
a while. Set in the year 3013, not long after galactic
civilisation barely escaped an artificial intelligence
apocalypse and banned fully self-aware robots, the story is
related by Sasha, one of a small number of Self-Arresting
near Sentient Heuristic Androids built to be useful without
running the risk of their taking over. SASHA robots are
equipped with an impossible-to-defeat watchdog module which
causes a hard reboot whenever they are on the verge of having an
original thought. The limitation of the design proved
a serious handicap, and all of their manufacturers went bankrupt.
Our narrator, Sasha, was bought at an auction by the protagonist, Rex
Nihilo, for thirty-five credits in a lot of “ASSORTED
MACHINE PARTS”. Sasha is Rex's assistant and sidekick.
Rex is an adventurer. Sasha says he “never had much of
an interest in anything but self-preservation and the
accumulation of wealth, the latter taking clear precedence over
the former.” Sasha's built in limitations (in addition to
the new idea watchdog, she is unable to tell a lie, but if
humans should draw incorrect conclusions from incomplete
information she provides them, well…) pose problems in
Rex's assorted lines of work, most of which seem to involve
scams, gambling, and contraband of various kinds. In fact, Rex
seems to fit in very well with the universe he inhabits, which
appears to be firmly grounded in Walker's Law: “Absent
evidence to the contrary, assume everything is a scam”.
Evidence appears almost totally absent, and the oppressive
tyranny called the Galactic Malarchy, those who supply it, the
rebels who oppose it, entrepreneurs like Rex working in the
cracks, organised religions and cults, and just about everybody
else, appear to be on the make or on the take, looking to grift
everybody else for their own account. Cosmologists attribute
this to the “Strong Misanthropic Principle, which asserts
that the universe exists in order to screw with us.” Rex
does his part, although he usually seems to veer between broke
and dangerously in debt.
Perhaps that's due to his somewhat threadbare talent stack. As
Shasha describes him, Rex doesn't have a head for numbers. Nor
does he have much of a head for letters, and “Newtonian
physics isn't really his strong suit either”. He is,
however, occasionally lucky, or so it seems at first. In an
absurdly high-stakes card game with weapons merchant Gavin
Larviton, reputed to be one of the wealthiest men in the galaxy,
Rex manages to win, almost honestly, not only Larviton's
personal starship, but an entire planet, Schnufnaasik Six. After
barely escaping a raid by Malarchian marines led by the dread
and squeaky-voiced Lord Heinous Vlaak, Rex and Sasha set off in
the ship Rex has won, the Flagrante Delicto, to
survey the planetary prize.
It doesn't take Rex long to discover, not surprisingly, that
he's been had, and that his financial situation is now far more
dire than he'd previously been able to imagine. If any of
the bounty hunters now on his trail should collar him, he could
spend a near-eternity on the prison planet of Gulagatraz (the
names are a delight in themselves). So, it's off the rebel base
on the forest moon (which is actually a swamp; the swamp
moon is all desert) to try to con the Frente Repugnante (all the
other names were taken by rival splinter factions, so they
ended up with “Revolting Front”, which was
translated to Spanish to appear to Latino planets) into
paying for a secret weapon which exists only in Rex's
imagination.
Thus we embark upon a romp which has a laugh-out-loud line about
every other page. This is comic science fiction in the vein of
Keith Laumer's
Retief
stories. As with Laumer, Kroese achieves the perfect balance
of laugh lines, plot development, interesting ideas,
and recurring gags (there's a planet-destroying weapon called
the “plasmatic entropy cannon” which the
oft-inebriated Rex refers to variously as the
“positronic endoscopy cannon”,
“pulmonary embolism cannon”,
“ponderosa alopecia cannon”,
“propitious elderberry cannon”,
and many other ways). There is a huge and satisfying
reveal at the end—I kind of expected one was
coming, but I'd have never guessed the details.
If reading this leaves you with an appetite for more Rex
Nihilo, there is a prequel novella,
The Chicolini Incident,
and a sequel,
Aye, Robot.
The Kindle edition is free for Kindle
Unlimited subscribers.
February 2018 