James Nicoll Reviews

2001’s Crossover is the first volume of Joel Shepherd’s Cassandra Kresnov science fiction adventure series.

April Cassidy has a perfectly pleasant life in the delightfully cosmopolitan city of Tanusha on the planet Callay. However, should the Callayans discover that April Cassidy is actually Cassandra Kresnov and that Cassandra is a more a what than a who, a torch-waving mob is not out of the question.

But first! A word about global economic convergence.

During the 21^st, the inexorable process of economic convergence combined with Asia’s lion’s share of the human population on Earth meant the planet’s economic center moved east. While rising prosperity inevitably brought with it universal, global democracy in the form of the Federation¹, there were those in the West who resented the loss of dominance.

The development of starflight combined with the discovery of many Earth-like worlds offered a solution to disgruntled Westerners: flee to the stars to set up their own nation, the League. The League sees itself as a nation of visionaries, unbounded by namby-pamby concerns like prudence or decency… which gets us back to Cassandra and that potential torch-waving mob.

Cassandra is an artificial person. The comparatively conservative Federation shuns the creation of artificial people. The League does not. After all, the League’s human population is much smaller than the Federation’s and androids make excellent, if unimaginative, cannon-fodder. Even better, the League need not feed, house, or clothe androids between wars. It simply murders the android GIs as soon as they become surplus to need.

Cassandra is an advanced model android, smart enough to understand that remaining in the League would mean death. Thus, her flight to the Federation and her current pose as a perfectly normal human woman who is not in any way a killing machine from whom all decent Federation citizens would flee in terror… or combine to lynch.

Alas for Cassandra, the Federal Intelligence Agency notices Cassandra. For the FIA, Cassandra is a valuable source of information on the League’s superior artificial life technology. One snatch and grab later, and Cassandra is dismembered in a lab.

Cassandra is saved by two unrelated factors. First, androids are stupendously tough and it would take more than a little extreme vivisection to fully deactivate her. Second, the Callayan Security Agency raids the unsanctioned FIA lab. The FIA agents flee, leaving Cassandra behind.

On the one hand, CSA officers are decent people serving a largely humane planetary government and vivisecting people to see how their innards work is clearly bad. On the other hand, Cassandra is clearly an abomination whose very existence is an affront and the fact she was created to kill Federation soldiers is egregious tampering in God’s domain. Cassandra’s prospects appear dim.

Luckily for Cassandra, the FIA operation over which the CSA stumbled is only the tip of the illicit espionage iceberg present on Callay. Callay’s government is in more danger than it knows. For Cassandra, this is an opportunity to ingratiate herself to her hosts in a time-honored way: risking her own life in saving the lives of people who would otherwise cheerfully cram her into a disintegration chamber. What could go wrong?

~oOo~

Warning: I will complain at length about this novel. However, I can assure readers that eventually I will get around to praising some elements of this novel. Also, be warned that my tendency to focus on the setting to the exclusion of the characters will be egregiously indulged.

Cassandra is an action-adventure heroine of the ​“clearly written by a guy” variety, which means she starts off the novel ogling her super-hotness in the mirror, after which it’s only a little hyperbolic to say that every space between words and every break between paragraphs is consumed with Cassandra thinking lustily about sex.

If this were unique to Cassandra, it would simply raise questions about the League’s design criteria for their GIs. However, supporting character Lieutenant Vanessa Rice is just as horny. She’s a leg-humping bisexual who spends a lot of the book frustrated that Cassandra is straight. Ah, well. The libidos in the novel are no more overcharged than those in Hamilton’s best-selling Merry Gentry novels.

What caught my attention when I read the 2006 Pyr edition of this 2001 novel were the unusual worldbuilding choices. For example, despite cover copy suggesting that the city of Tanusha is decadent², Tanusha seems to be a marvel of civil administration, whose government somehow manages to give its diverse population³ functional urban design and management (despite the best efforts of some functionaries). Tanusha’s main flaw is being a convenient stage for galacto-political skullduggery. Without the secret agents and supersoldiers running around shooting at each other, Tanusha would be a great place to live. As SF prefers to present cities as hives of squalor, poverty, and violence, the Tanusha setting is unusual.

Furthermore, while there are many SF novels imagining breakaway space nations settled by freedom-loving Westerners fleeing conservative, Eurasian-dominated Earths, it’s more usual to present Earth as a backward, overpopulated pesthole. This quote from Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 is an unremarkable example:

As for Africa, people say it’s a development sink. Outside aid disappears into it and nothing ever changes. Ruined long ago by slavers, they say. Full of diseases, torched by the temperature rise. Nothing to be done. The thing is, now those are the conditions everywhere. The industrial rustbelts are just as bad. So you could say Earth itself is now a development sink. The marrow has been sucked dry, and most of the upper classes went to Mars long ago.” 

Shepherd’s Earth, on the other hands, is a Fukuyaman utopia, the invisible hand of the market having forced nations across the planet into wealth, freedom, and regular elections:

They thought the only way to fight the West was to adopt their greatest strengths and make them Chinese strengths too. And they got enormously powerful doing that, and in the process inevitably turned into a democracy over time, because the old totalitarianisms just weren’t capable of handling the modern market system effectively. 

I also note that the West-loving League’s technological exuberance expresses itself in new frontiers in slavery and homicidal RIFs. Whereas the supposedly conservative Callayans don’t immediately euthanize Cassandra on discovery, but invest a lot of time fretting about how to reconcile their ethics with their legal system., while carefully explaining their moral and legal reasoning to Cassandra.

Not only was the setting of this book unusual for SF in general, it was extremely unusual in the context of 2006, when I read the Pyr ARC. Novels based on the optimistic assumption things would mostly work out, that societies were on a greased rail towards progress, that techbros are really fucking annoying, that people in Eurasia are not terrifying faceless mobs scheming to topple famous skyscrapers while instituting tyrannies, were very thin on the ground.

I am aware that not every reader cares about worldbuilding. Others will find the author’s assumptions hopelessly optimistic and his portrayal of other cultures superficial. Those readers may be more interested in the action scenes. Skulls are duggery, buckles are swashed, and munition manufacturer stocks no doubt soar thanks to the increased demand from Callay. This won’t do property values any great favors, but it is all terribly exciting.

Crossover is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

I could not find Crossover at Barnes & Noble, and while Apple does offer a version, it is the audio book.

1: Also known as the Confederation. One or the other, guys. It’s like calling the same nation America and the USA.

2: The cover copy is correct to call Tanusha enormous. Of Callay’s one hundred-twenty million people, fifty-seven million call Tanusha home. I cannot help but notice Shepherd’s native Australia has a similar pattern, five cities containing 60% of the population. My own Canada is similarly concentrated in a few large cities. This seems the sensible way to arrange things. No offense to deviant nations who arrange their populations in less optimal ways. I am sure your bad choices won’t come back to haunt you.

3: Diverse population as presented in a birds-eye view.