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Gideon’s Sword

Preston & Child 2011

Review

This is the first book in Preston & Child’s Gideon Crew series. As a thriller it hits the marks it should hit, the writing is engaging, and the set-up has the right blend of the familiar with something new and interesting. There are some things about it that put me a little off though.

The book opens with us meeting Gideon Crew and seeing Preston & Child establish his credentials as a bad-ass expert with flaws. There are a few opening chapters that present his childhood tragedy, the revelation about the villain behind it, and then Gideon getting his vengeance after years of work.

Once that’s done, he’s recruited by a mysterious group working with the government to go solo on a very important mission to get the MacGuffin. There’s he’s also informed of something that colors every decision he’ll make. From there he faces the person or persons going after the same thing, consults his only real ally, connects with others to help him, and bluffs his way into getting a lot of the pieces he needs to put together. Along the way it gets personal, Gideon is desperate and out of option, and the climax is a frankly fantastic set piece. There’s also a nice little character beat at the end before the set up for his next mission is presented.

It sounds like I’m ripping on the book but my point is if you’re looking for a good thriller this one fits the bill. My only real complaint is I think he gets too lucky too often.

What follows may contain more information than readers who, like me, want to go in knowing as few details as possible. So spoiler warning.

If Gideon’s age is established I either missed it or forgot. I’m picturing him in his mid-twenties. He’s got a doctorate, a good job at lab, and a new realization that his life is empty now that he’s gotten the revenge he worked so long and hard for. When he’s recruited by Effective Engineer Solutions, a government contractor hired to solve problems, he’s presented with the well-paying task of getting the plans of a super-weapon from a Chinese national fleeing to the United States. They also tell him that due to an inoperable, terminal condition that will see him dead within a year, two at the most.

That twist I like. Since there are five Gideon Crew books he’s squeezing a lot into those years. His luck, I don’t like so much. Early in the book, a henchman who goes back years with the villain, ultra-loyal, has Gideon dead to rights and opts to not kill him as ordered because Gideon, who he’s just met and has been fully sold on being the bad guy, convinces him the boss he’s been so loyal to all these years has lied to him and this bad guy he’s been sent to kill, after likely killing dozens of ‘bad guys’ on his boss’s orders, is not really a bad guy. My suspension of disbelief snapped right there. The women who fall fast and hard for him, one ready to dive feet first into his dangerous world, were something else I thought were too much. There’s a great twist with one I should have seen coming but didn’t, so mad respect to Preston & Child for that perfectly executed bit.

Really Gideon’s best talent seems to be spinning lies to convince people to let him go where he needs to go and see things he needs to see to put the pieces of the mystery together. And it’s a good mystery. The super-weapon angle is not what it seems and I liked that a lot.

So anyone who enjoys political action thrillers should find this introduction to Gideon Crew, other than being a little dated now, a fun read.

The wrap-up of the Cities in Flight series is a dense presentation of cosmological calculus and theoretical physics with a story squeezed between long paragraphs of exposition and intricate discussion about applying theories to an overwhelming problem.

It has been another generations-long time jump between the last book, “Earthman, Come Home” and the start of this one, which is fine. That’s a good place for a time jump. The story itself opens as one taking a look at the question of how virtually immortal people who have spent centuries as spacefarers adapt when they’ve settled their flying city permanently on a planet. Two young characters, born on that planet, are a device to lend perspective on that theme and though thinly characterized, often with some rapid “telling”, they do the job well.

Some inter-personal conflicts come up along with the presentation of a philosophical movement that I thought were going to be central to the story but, instead, we’re presented with the biggest stakes of all time and space; stakes that diminish those interesting things into bits of sometimes useful fluff for this new problem—which is addressed with those characteristics I mentioned in the first paragraph which often, in a way that seemed, even given the era Blish wrote this story, excessive, and all too frequently presenting sentences even longer and with more subdivided sections than this one, designed as a sort of example.

I looked for but could not find any contemporary reviews of this book or the omnibus collection I’ve been reading, so I can’t tell you how this was received back in the day. From the perspective of the second quarter of the twenty-first century though, it’s a slog (unless you’re particularly found of tromping through the weeds of dealing with an anti-matter incursion). It feels like those parts, which go on and on and on (I skimmed most of them, my eye looking for an indication that something was actually happening) could have been trimmed down considerably. Frankly, it comes off like padding. As does an entire section about what could have been a great sub-plot of a religious movement determined to sabotage things. Instead that’s a problem that’s quickly resolved by way of some clever use of some of that above-mentioned fluff and is only mentioned once, in passing, before the end of the book (despite a blatant hint the end of that problem was not going to be the end of that problem).

The first thing I said in my review of the first of these books was about the “...charms particular to old science fiction.” I’m bringing everything back around, full circle, to that point. Much of old science fiction included an almost lecture style presentation of hard science (or extrapolated science, a precursor in spirit to what we call “technobabble”) and Triumph of Time is an outstanding example of that. Sadly, to me, this meant so much of the promise of Blish’s setting, cities populated by virtually immortal humans flying through space, was left unexplored. The tastes of that promise he did deliver were great. I wish there had been more.

Of the four books, the first two are enjoyable for reasons beyond just being artifacts of mid-century science-fiction. The third falls somewhat short of that mark. The finale more so – but it does come to a satisfying ending amid all the drawbacks.

Postscript on those particular charms: I read long ago how of all the things classic science-fiction got right, it was just as interesting what it got wrong. Not only, in this case, how slow humanity’s space progress moved in the twentieth century (see the review of They Shall Have Stars for what I mean), but also how quickly computer technology would advance. In the last two books there are instances of top engineers and scientists using slide rules to solve problems. The computers of the stories are a bank of machines so giant they have literally been sinking into the floor. Meanwhile, whole cities are flying through space much faster than light and people are living for centuries.

The third book in the four-book series is a collection of four Cities in Flight stories, making it the longest of the set. Those four stories: “Okie”, “Bindlestiff”, “Sargasso of Lost Cities”, and “Earthman, Come Home” were published in collections and magazines well before book two saw the light of day (or the stars). All tell about the adventures of New York as it travels the galaxy under the guidance of Mayor Amalfi, aided by his city manager Hazelton.

Like the first two, this installment of Cities in Flight has the hallmarks of mid-century science-fiction, for better and for worse. The big ideas are there in abundance. The characters are memorable. The writing is solid if sometimes cliched (at least from the perspective of seventy years later). It’s nice to see rarely-seen words (I admit I needed to look a few up!) used well instead of being a clear indication the writer had a handy thesaurus and wanted to show off.

As a single ‘book’, Earthman, Come Home suffers from having originally been published as separate, standalone episodes. There’s some exposition dumps thinly disguised as normal conversations, which speaks of Blish not originally having the pages to stretch out. There’s some abilities and items that come out of nowhere in an “Oh, by the way, he can do this and always could” that might not have been so stark with months between reading one story and the next.

Finally, there’s the poor depiction of passing time, which took me out of the story two or three times. Because of medicine, human life is measured in centuries. Centuries are passing between stories. Decades are passing within. This is rarely mentioned. When it was, I found it jarring. This character was only brought onboard last story but now you’re telling me she’s three hundred years old? Where does the time go?

The drawbacks of the book don’t at all outweigh the cool parts (presuming you have the patience for classic science-fiction in the first place). There’s a lot of well-explored great ideas here, enough that each story could have been its own full-length novel. If you read and enjoyed the first two books, I think you’ll be glad to have read this one.

Next – A Clash of Cymbals concludes the series!

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