James Nicoll Reviews

Walter Jon Williams’ 1989 Angel Station is a stand-alone science fiction novel.

What failed trader Pasco left to his children, Ubu and Beautiful Maria: his rundown starship Runaway, massive debt, and an increasingly untenable lifestyle. Pasco was a self-deluding fool who invested years making a terrible situation worse, but he was not entirely to blame.

Runaway​’s situation is in part due to the Consolidation. Tired of economic chaos caused by unchecked expansion out at the Edge, the older, richer, higher-population worlds, in league with the Multiparty-Politicals, opted for planned growth. In this environment, the great corporations of the core worlds thrive, while the Edge faces economic slowdowns and an epidemic of bankruptcy¹.

Pasco genetically engineered his two children. Thus, Ubu is bright, has an eidetic memory, and four arms, while Maria is bright, beautiful, and has minor but useful psionic abilities. Balancing this, not only were Ubu and Maria homeschooled by a nincompoop, but Ubu is only thirteen, while Maria is eleven.

Bad luck and worse choices transform the siblings’ situation from economic desperation to legal disaster. Facing the certainty that the bank will foreclose on their ship, not to mention involuntary separation and possible jail time, the siblings do the only reasonable thing they can do. They sneak on board their impounded ship, flee from Angel Station, and make a blind jump into deepest space.

The plan is to look for tiny black holes, the sort used in FTL drives. These are valuable enough that Ubu and Maria should be able to pay their debts and bribe the legal authorities to forget minor transgressions like major fraud. The odds against finding even one black hole are long… but also irrelevant, because the pair find something even more precious: first contact with aliens.

Beloved comes from a biotechnological civilization. Each clan is autonomous (at least in theory). Each matriarch enjoys life and death power within their domains. Assisted by servants genetically engineered to be fanatically loyal, Beloved enjoys an unchallengeable autocratic status of which human dictators can only dream. This hasn’t worked out well for Beloved’s clan, which when Ubu and Maria encounter Beloved is down to a single starship . Beloved has headed out into unknown space in a desperate bid to find something that will salvage Beloved’s deplorable economic situation.

Ubu and Maria can offer Beloved computer technology that the alien cannot match. Beloved, via her loyal intermediary Twelve, can offer the humans pharmacological mass-production that humans cannot match. Both sides gain by the deal.

At least, everyone wins for as long as Twelve can bear dealing with the humans without going mad, and for as long as it takes some more canny trader to elbow Ubu and Maria aside.

~oOo~

1989 seems a bit late for magical black holes to be plausible. Especially small primordial black holes. Hawking revealed in the 1970s that not only do black holes evaporate, the smaller they are, the hotter they are and the faster they go poof. Of course those soaring temperatures should make a nearby small primordial black hole easier to spot.

My main takeaway from this re-read: Pasco was a bad dad and a worse trader. Yes, he did mean well, but he was not a guy who should have been allowed to kit-bash kids without close supervision. 

I remembered the inter-sibling incest. I also remembered that Ubu essentially pimps out Beautiful Maria. But I completely forgotten how young the siblings are. There was nobody to tell the kids that what they were doing was wrong. Nobody out on the Edge bats an eye at Ubu and Beautiful Maria’s sex life, because all of the other kids their age appear to have similar hobbies. The adults’ main concern seems to be not letting younger relatives’ childish infatuations enable sabotage.

Not that Williams glosses over the bits that would seem ugly to his readers. This isn’t a John Varley novel where adult-teen sexual relations are normalized and romanticized. 

Which makes me wonder if part of the reason the core worlds felt the need to intervene in the Edge was the uses to which the great and powerful put their kids. There’s no evidence of that. The core worlders are an off-stage presence and we only get the Edge’s perspective.

Whereas Knight Moves was Williams’ Roger-Zelazny-adjacent novel, Angel Station is his C. J.-Cherryh-adjacent novel. The siblings spend the book denied vital information and subjected to brutal treatment; they find themselves in increasingly dire situations, situations in which the consequences for mistakes are calamitous². Also Cherryh-like: the sketchy sex. Remember Signy Mallory’s dubious hobbies in Downbelow Station and the Lady Dela Kirn’s in Port Eternity.

While Ubu and Maria’s problems don’t make for pleasant reading, the narrative is skillfully executed. And, while it might be an overstatement to call the ending happy, there’s no doubt that the characters’ efforts earned it.

Angel Station is available here (Smashwords), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), here (Kobo), and here (Words Worth Books).

I did not find Angel Station at Bookshop UK. I did find two versions of the audio book at Chapter-Indigo… at double the price asked for the audiobook by Kobo.

1: USA delenda est.

2: One could also mine the novel for Traveller material. Although I don’t know on which career table Ubu or Maria should be rolled up.