- Carroll, Michael.
Europa's Lost Expedition.
Cham, Switzerland: Springer International, 2017.
ISBN 978-3-319-43158-1.
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In the epoch in which this story is set the expansion of the
human presence into the solar system was well advanced, with
large settlements on the Moon and Mars, exploitation of the
abundant resources in the main asteroid belt, and research
outposts in exotic environments such as Jupiter's enigmatic moon
Europa, when civilisation on Earth was consumed, as so often
seems to happen when too many primates who evolved to live in
small bands are packed into a limited space, by a
global conflict which the survivors, a decade later, refer to
simply as “The War”, as its horrors and costs
dwarfed all previous human conflicts.
Now, with The War over and recovery underway, scientific work is
resuming, and an international expedition has been launched to
explore the southern hemisphere of Europa, where the icy crust
of the moon is sufficiently thin to provide access to the liquid
water ocean beneath and the complex orbital dynamics of
Jupiter's moons were expected to trigger a once in a decade
eruption of geysers, with cracks in the ice allowing the ocean
to spew into space, providing an opportunity to sample it
“for free”.
Europa is not a hospitable environment for humans. Orbiting
deep within Jupiter's magnetosphere, it is in the heart of the
giant planet's radiation belts, which are sufficiently powerful
to kill an unprotected human within minutes. But the radiation
is not uniform and humans are clever. The main base on Europa,
Taliesen, is located on the face of the moon that points away
from Jupiter, and in the leading hemisphere where radiation is
least intense. On Europa, abundant electrical power is
available simply by laying out cables along the surface, in
which Jupiter's magnetic field induces powerful currents as they
cut it. This power is used to erect a magnetic shield around
the base which protects it from the worst, just as Earth's
magnetic field shields life on its surface. Brief ventures into
the “hot zone” are made possible by shielded rovers
and advanced anti-radiation suits.
The present expedition will not be the first to attempt exploration
of the southern hemisphere. Before the War, an expedition with
similar objectives ended in disaster, with the loss of all members
under circumstances which remain deeply mysterious, and of which
the remaining records, incomplete and garbled by radiation,
provide few clues as to what happened to them. Hadley Nobile,
expedition leader, is not so much concerned with the past
as making the most of this rare opportunity. Her deputy
and long-term collaborator, Gibson van Clive, however, is fascinated
by the mystery and spends hours trying to recover and piece
together the fragmentary records from the lost expedition and
research the backgrounds of its members and the physical
evidence, some of which makes no sense at all. The other
members of the new expedition are known from their scientific
reputations, but not personally to the leaders. Many people
have blanks in their curricula vitae during the
War years, and those who lived through that time are rarely
inclined to probe too deeply.
Once the party arrive at Taliesen and begin preparations for
their trip to the south, a series of “accidents”
befall some members, who are found dead in circumstances which
seem implausible based upon their experience. Down to the bare
minimum team, with a volunteer replacement from the base's
complement, Hadley decides to press on—the geysers wait
for no one.
Thus begins what is basically a murder mystery, explicitly
patterned on Agatha Christie's And Then
There Were None, layered upon the enigmas of the lost
expedition, the backgrounds of those in the current team, and
the biosphere which may thrive in the ocean beneath the ice,
driven by the tides raised by Jupiter and the other moons and
fed by undersea plumes similar to those where some suspect life
began on Earth.
As a mystery, there is little more that can be said without
crossing the line into plot spoilers, so I will refrain from
further description. Worthy of a Christie tale, there are many
twists and turns, and few things are as the seem on the
surface.
As in his previous novel, On the Shores of
Titan's Farthest Sea (December 2016), the author, a
distinguished scientific illustrator and popular science writer,
goes to great lengths to base the exotic locale in which the
story is set upon the best presently-available scientific
knowledge. An appendix, “The Science Behind the
Story”, provides details and source citations for the
setting of the story and the technologies which figure in it.
While the science and technology are plausible extrapolations
from what is presently known, the characters sometimes seem to
behave more in the interests of advancing the plot than as real
people would in such circumstances. If you were the leader or
part of an expedition several members of which had died under
suspicious circumstances at the base camp, would you really be
inclined to depart for a remote field site with spotty
communications along with all of the prime suspects?
December 2019 