A review by trike
The Russia Shift by Antony Johnston
1.0
I hate to give one star reviews but these kinds of stories just annoy me to no end. The basics: this is a police procedural set on a space station, the titular Fuse, about a century in the future.
Sadly, this is terrible Science Fiction and a terrible Mystery story. Hashtag rant mode commence.
It starts off as a new detective ships up from Munich and is immediately embroiled in a murder case. Seriously, as soon as he steps off the shuttle a person drops dead right in front of him. Boom! We're off to the races.
Ugh. I hate stupid-ass coincidences like that.
This is compounded by two things: the dying person is not just hemorrhaging the red go-juice of life, but also cash. WHY IS THERE PAPER MONEY ON A SPACE STATION?! Back in the 1950s, even up to the early 1970s, I can see someone making this mistake, because everything was paper back then. It was even how we programmed computers. But this book was written sometime in 2013. Come on.
I just watched Aliens again last night, and it's embarrassing that a movie from 1986 is more futuristic than a book published in 2014.
This is underscored by the fact that our new guy, Ralph Dietrich, calls his superiors from a pay phone. Seriously, did Johnston write this in 1989 and then simply cross out "New York City" and write in "New Space City" when it came time to make it?
Everywhere they go the place looks like any standard Earth city. Small houses, green lawns, white picket fences, run-down tenements with graffiti... oh fer cry. The doors in the police precinct look like wood. I'll cut them some slack and pretend they're painted to look like wood, but who are we kidding? They're fucking wood.
There are books on the shelves. Calendars on the walls, sticky notes and folders. Why? Paper is HEAVY. If transport to high Earth orbit is so cheap that they can waste fuel and space on something so heavy, why is that not reflected in the general economy everywhere else?
See, someone who had actually thought about the world they were creating -- or perhaps had read any science fiction at all -- would have thought of that.
You know how you show that someone is super rich on a space station? Put real books on their shelves. Make it an actual private library. Seriously, that's how unbelievably expensive and wasteful it would be to take a bunch of books into orbit. Paper is also a fire hazard, and fire can turn into a literal Extinction Level Event aboard a space station, unless it's so gigantic that humans barely take up a tenth of it. We see the Fuse from the outside. It ain't that big.
Plus, if you simply spin out current trends towards digital everything, why would someone 100 years from now even use paper? Not just on a space station, but anywhere? The past few years Hollywood has been collectively pissing its pants because people under 30 simply aren't buying hard copies of movies any more. The music industry is in freefall because kids aren't even buying digital versions of songs any more, they're streaming everything.
Science fiction is about extrapolation -- extrapolate three generations of people whose mindset is that they can stream anything any time. Those people 100 years from now would look at paper books and video discs the same way we look at papyrus scrolls and anvils: not-very-interesting relics of a bygone era.
I could go on but let's rant about the police procedural portion of this book. It's no better.
This reads like one of the less-interesting episodes of Law & Order, the kind of episode that they throw together based on some newspaper headline and because it's season 19 and they're pretty much out of ideas due to having cranked out more than 400 of these already, so they just plug standard characters into the formula and give them boilerplate dialogue.
The problem with doing a procedural, any kind of procedural, is that this is the single most popular form of story type in our culture, and has been for decades. Fully 50% of all TV shows are procedurals. The other 50% are everything else: sitcoms, reality shows, dramas, news magazines and competitions like The Voice and American Idol.
Since procedurals are so common, why stick to the formula? At the very least, show us something new based on your milieu. It's a space station, so do something with that. That's how you push it into new territory.
But if you're going to do that, then at the very least read the other SF procedurals that are out there. Niven, Varley, Walter Jon Williams -- they all have excellent versions. Ed Naha wrote two terrific books called [b:The Paradise Plot|1262587|The Paradise Plot|Ed Naha|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1260900896s/1262587.jpg|1251447] and [b:The Suicide Plague|1979676|The Suicide Plague|Ed Naha|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1260900966s/1979676.jpg|1983068], and The Paradise Plot takes place on a space station. In fact, it's one incredibly similar to the Fuse.
Now that I think on it, The Fuse is actually a lame version of The Paradise Plot. You should read that book instead, it's good.
As I also ponder it, the opening of The Fuse tries to mash up the flying-to-orbit scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey and the pre-credits sequence in Die Hard. The difference here is that in 2001 we got to see that Dr. Floyd is a VIP because he's on an otherwise empty shuttle. A lot of people miss that aspect of the film. In Die Hard, McClane has an interaction with his seatmate who tells him the best way to calm down after a flight is to take off your shoes and make fists with your toes. Then it's revealed that McClane has a gun, which shocks the other guy. McClane tells him to relax because he's a cop. In The Fuse there's a similar exchange where a woman confesses that she's running away from something and then Dietrich reveals that he's a cop, much to her dismay.
The problem is The Fuse never does anything with the information we're given in the shuttle ride. When McClane tries the "make fists with your toes" thing, he discovers that it works and it's a funny moment. But then the bad guys show up and he's caught barefoot in the middle of a hostage situation. He's caught literally flat-footed. Get it? A slang word for a cop is "flatfoot." This is why Die Hard is so good: it's working on all these other levels besides the main story. And if you've seen the movie, you know that being barefoot in this situation plays into 1) the character arc, 2) the plot and 3) the action scenes. A seemingly throw-away line perpetuates itself throughout the movie.
The Fuse has none of that, yet borrows from its betters.
Dietrich even has a real gun, just like John McClane. On a space station. "Oh, don't worry," he assures his boss, "I know better than to discharge a gun in a pressurized cylinder." Then why do you have it? Why was he allowed to keep it? You better be a pretty damn good shot if you're going to start blasting away, potentially poking holes in the hull and killing everyone.
Here's an idea: try a goddamn taser instead.
See? This is what I mean by not taking the unique setting into account. There are limitations and issues that one can't get around inside a space station, yet not a single one of those are addressed. they might as well be in Detroit or Hamburg.
The last issue/chapter was such a cliche, with the cop and bad guy holed up together and they put all the pieces together for the reader. It's the worst kind of infodump in a procedural, just absolutely lazy. Let us figure it out, at least.
Remember that coincidence in the opening I talked about? Yeah, there are a few more throughout the story. They're dumb, though, and not worth lengthening this already ridiculously long review for.
The art is okay. The problem is that characters look too much alike.
Dietrich is a black cop and the mayor is likewise black. They look almost exactly the same. And I don't mean that in a racist way, I mean they're drawn to be nearly identical. The only way to tell them apart is that one wears a tie (on a space station) and the other wears a jacket. They are the same height, shape, haircut, everything.
Maybe this will come into play in later installments, but I don't care. I won't be reading them. All it does here is cause confusion.
The primary way the characters are differentiated is by color. These people literally never change clothes. The only way you tell them apart is by the color of their shirts. That's another indicator we're playing for the cheap seats here, when everything is like a cartoon.
I just read the superb [b:Manifest Destiny, Vol. 1: Flora & Fauna|20881158|Manifest Destiny, Vol. 1 Flora & Fauna|Chris Dingess|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1392998657s/20881158.jpg|40221534], where the characters have to wear similar clothing because some of them are soldiers and the rest are given only a limited palette and materials to work with, yet you can immediately tell who's who at a glance.
I started The Fuse before I started Manifest Destiny... or Saga Volume 4, or The Flash or Ms. Marvel or Captain Marvel and I kept putting it off because it was just so clunky and annoying. The book seemed like it was getting heavier each time I went to read it, and I couldn't get through an entire chapter/issue, which is only 22 pages or something. Of a comic book. I finished all of those other books before finishing this one.
The Fuse is a Science Fiction Police Procedural and it's bad at both.
Sadly, this is terrible Science Fiction and a terrible Mystery story. Hashtag rant mode commence.
It starts off as a new detective ships up from Munich and is immediately embroiled in a murder case. Seriously, as soon as he steps off the shuttle a person drops dead right in front of him. Boom! We're off to the races.
Ugh. I hate stupid-ass coincidences like that.
This is compounded by two things: the dying person is not just hemorrhaging the red go-juice of life, but also cash. WHY IS THERE PAPER MONEY ON A SPACE STATION?! Back in the 1950s, even up to the early 1970s, I can see someone making this mistake, because everything was paper back then. It was even how we programmed computers. But this book was written sometime in 2013. Come on.
I just watched Aliens again last night, and it's embarrassing that a movie from 1986 is more futuristic than a book published in 2014.
This is underscored by the fact that our new guy, Ralph Dietrich, calls his superiors from a pay phone. Seriously, did Johnston write this in 1989 and then simply cross out "New York City" and write in "New Space City" when it came time to make it?
Everywhere they go the place looks like any standard Earth city. Small houses, green lawns, white picket fences, run-down tenements with graffiti... oh fer cry. The doors in the police precinct look like wood. I'll cut them some slack and pretend they're painted to look like wood, but who are we kidding? They're fucking wood.
There are books on the shelves. Calendars on the walls, sticky notes and folders. Why? Paper is HEAVY. If transport to high Earth orbit is so cheap that they can waste fuel and space on something so heavy, why is that not reflected in the general economy everywhere else?
See, someone who had actually thought about the world they were creating -- or perhaps had read any science fiction at all -- would have thought of that.
You know how you show that someone is super rich on a space station? Put real books on their shelves. Make it an actual private library. Seriously, that's how unbelievably expensive and wasteful it would be to take a bunch of books into orbit. Paper is also a fire hazard, and fire can turn into a literal Extinction Level Event aboard a space station, unless it's so gigantic that humans barely take up a tenth of it. We see the Fuse from the outside. It ain't that big.
Plus, if you simply spin out current trends towards digital everything, why would someone 100 years from now even use paper? Not just on a space station, but anywhere? The past few years Hollywood has been collectively pissing its pants because people under 30 simply aren't buying hard copies of movies any more. The music industry is in freefall because kids aren't even buying digital versions of songs any more, they're streaming everything.
Science fiction is about extrapolation -- extrapolate three generations of people whose mindset is that they can stream anything any time. Those people 100 years from now would look at paper books and video discs the same way we look at papyrus scrolls and anvils: not-very-interesting relics of a bygone era.
I could go on but let's rant about the police procedural portion of this book. It's no better.
This reads like one of the less-interesting episodes of Law & Order, the kind of episode that they throw together based on some newspaper headline and because it's season 19 and they're pretty much out of ideas due to having cranked out more than 400 of these already, so they just plug standard characters into the formula and give them boilerplate dialogue.
The problem with doing a procedural, any kind of procedural, is that this is the single most popular form of story type in our culture, and has been for decades. Fully 50% of all TV shows are procedurals. The other 50% are everything else: sitcoms, reality shows, dramas, news magazines and competitions like The Voice and American Idol.
Since procedurals are so common, why stick to the formula? At the very least, show us something new based on your milieu. It's a space station, so do something with that. That's how you push it into new territory.
But if you're going to do that, then at the very least read the other SF procedurals that are out there. Niven, Varley, Walter Jon Williams -- they all have excellent versions. Ed Naha wrote two terrific books called [b:The Paradise Plot|1262587|The Paradise Plot|Ed Naha|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1260900896s/1262587.jpg|1251447] and [b:The Suicide Plague|1979676|The Suicide Plague|Ed Naha|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1260900966s/1979676.jpg|1983068], and The Paradise Plot takes place on a space station. In fact, it's one incredibly similar to the Fuse.
Now that I think on it, The Fuse is actually a lame version of The Paradise Plot. You should read that book instead, it's good.
As I also ponder it, the opening of The Fuse tries to mash up the flying-to-orbit scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey and the pre-credits sequence in Die Hard. The difference here is that in 2001 we got to see that Dr. Floyd is a VIP because he's on an otherwise empty shuttle. A lot of people miss that aspect of the film. In Die Hard, McClane has an interaction with his seatmate who tells him the best way to calm down after a flight is to take off your shoes and make fists with your toes. Then it's revealed that McClane has a gun, which shocks the other guy. McClane tells him to relax because he's a cop. In The Fuse there's a similar exchange where a woman confesses that she's running away from something and then Dietrich reveals that he's a cop, much to her dismay.
The problem is The Fuse never does anything with the information we're given in the shuttle ride. When McClane tries the "make fists with your toes" thing, he discovers that it works and it's a funny moment. But then the bad guys show up and he's caught barefoot in the middle of a hostage situation. He's caught literally flat-footed. Get it? A slang word for a cop is "flatfoot." This is why Die Hard is so good: it's working on all these other levels besides the main story. And if you've seen the movie, you know that being barefoot in this situation plays into 1) the character arc, 2) the plot and 3) the action scenes. A seemingly throw-away line perpetuates itself throughout the movie.
The Fuse has none of that, yet borrows from its betters.
Dietrich even has a real gun, just like John McClane. On a space station. "Oh, don't worry," he assures his boss, "I know better than to discharge a gun in a pressurized cylinder." Then why do you have it? Why was he allowed to keep it? You better be a pretty damn good shot if you're going to start blasting away, potentially poking holes in the hull and killing everyone.
Here's an idea: try a goddamn taser instead.
See? This is what I mean by not taking the unique setting into account. There are limitations and issues that one can't get around inside a space station, yet not a single one of those are addressed. they might as well be in Detroit or Hamburg.
The last issue/chapter was such a cliche, with the cop and bad guy holed up together and they put all the pieces together for the reader. It's the worst kind of infodump in a procedural, just absolutely lazy. Let us figure it out, at least.
Remember that coincidence in the opening I talked about? Yeah, there are a few more throughout the story. They're dumb, though, and not worth lengthening this already ridiculously long review for.
The art is okay. The problem is that characters look too much alike.
Dietrich is a black cop and the mayor is likewise black. They look almost exactly the same. And I don't mean that in a racist way, I mean they're drawn to be nearly identical. The only way to tell them apart is that one wears a tie (on a space station) and the other wears a jacket. They are the same height, shape, haircut, everything.
Maybe this will come into play in later installments, but I don't care. I won't be reading them. All it does here is cause confusion.
The primary way the characters are differentiated is by color. These people literally never change clothes. The only way you tell them apart is by the color of their shirts. That's another indicator we're playing for the cheap seats here, when everything is like a cartoon.
I just read the superb [b:Manifest Destiny, Vol. 1: Flora & Fauna|20881158|Manifest Destiny, Vol. 1 Flora & Fauna|Chris Dingess|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1392998657s/20881158.jpg|40221534], where the characters have to wear similar clothing because some of them are soldiers and the rest are given only a limited palette and materials to work with, yet you can immediately tell who's who at a glance.
I started The Fuse before I started Manifest Destiny... or Saga Volume 4, or The Flash or Ms. Marvel or Captain Marvel and I kept putting it off because it was just so clunky and annoying. The book seemed like it was getting heavier each time I went to read it, and I couldn't get through an entire chapter/issue, which is only 22 pages or something. Of a comic book. I finished all of those other books before finishing this one.
The Fuse is a Science Fiction Police Procedural and it's bad at both.