Several years ago, I decided I’d no longer read new science fiction debut novels — that is, ones published in the year, and after, I made the decision. Too many failed to live up to the hype. True, that’s the nature of twenty-first century publishing — instant success, or no career. It doesn’t help that fandom on social media gloms onto certain aspects of new novels, as if the presence of those elements, or indeed their absence, makes the books better than everything else, old or new. Then there’s the tribalism which suddenly springs up around previously-unpublished authors…
Of course, all this means little to 90% of sf readers. Nothing that happens on social media, or in fandom— although there are exceptions—has much impact on the sales of science fiction novels.
I had thought Artifact Space (2021, Canada) was a debut novel, as the name Miles Cameron was unknown to me. And it is indeed a debut, but a debut science fiction novel. Miles Cameron, a Canadian novelist actually called Christian Cameron, has been churning out two or three a novels a year for the past twenty years, mostly historical fiction and fantasy.
And yet…
The world-building in Artifact Space is the usual North American mix of high technology and robber-baron economics. It has sentient AIs and sex trafficking, FTL and indentured labour. It’s as if North American sf can’t conceive of any economic model except that which typifies the worst excesses of its own brand of slave-economy-derived capitalism. Almost as if, in fact, it doesn’t even understand other politico-economic models exist, quite successfully, even more successfully than the US’s, and indeed prosper. To be fair, that’s perhaps a bit harsh a charge to level at a Canadian author.
Anyway… Humanity has spread out to the stars after Earth’s climate crashed. The Directorate of Human Corporations more or less governs a dozen or so planets, those not ruled by the Chinese, who have their own interstellar empire… and this sort of racial essentialism, or indeed racism, is yet another hallmark of US space opera. Which is not to say the DHC is not diverse, as its planets include cultures from several different Earth nations and religions. The DHC is especially important because it has a monopoly on “xenoglas”, an alien material it trades for gold from the Starfish, mysterious aliens.
The protagonist of Artifact Space is Marca Nbaro, whose parents were patricians, ie rich people, but they died, and with their deaths went their power and influence and wealth, so Nbaro has been sent to the Orphanage, which trains orphans for the Service, a sort of combination navy and merchant marine which operates the DHC’s spaceships… And one chapter in and the reader is already choking on clichés. Especially when it turns out the Orphanage is like something out of Dickens, and girl students who upset the principal are sold off to brothels… But Nbaro pays a hacker to fake her scores and gets herself assigned to a Greatship, the Athens.
The Athens heads off towards Trade Point. But someone wants to prevent the Greatship from reaching its destination — it could be the Chinese, or a rival faction in the DHC, or, wait, who are these mysterious aliens in the black bubble spaceships? Happily, Nbaro proves pivotal in defending the ship from all of these calamities. The master of the Greatship describes her as “lucky”, but that’s being dishonest rather than generous. She saves them every single time and that’s just plain improbable.
But if Nbaro is far too over-powered a character for her role, and the background is just some random poorly-thought-out US space opera universe, it must be said Artifact Space scores well when it comes to its plotting. It sets up genuine mysteries, and either resolves them, or hands out enough clues to keep the mystery fresh for the length of the novel. And into its sequel. I didn’t care for the cast or the world-building, but I kept on turning the pages, and am halfway towards deciding to buy the sequel, Deep Black, when it appears, because Cameron writes a good plot.
I don’t think Artifact Space — and the US spelling of the title from a UK publisher, and from Gollancz too!, should have been a red flag —necessarily invalidates my rule about debut science fiction novels. Artifact Space may not strictly be a debut novel, it displays all the faults of many debut space operas. You could do worse…
But you could do so much better.
