Review: Driving the Deep, by Suzanne Palmer

Driving the Deep is science fiction, a sequel to Finder (not to be confused with Finders, Emma Bull's Finder, or the many other books and manga with the same title). It stands alone and you could start reading here, although there will be spoilers for the first book of the series. It's Suzanne Palmer's second novel.

When Fergus Ferguson was fifteen, he stole his cousin's motorcycle to escape an abusive home, stashed it in a storage locker, and got the hell off of Earth. Nineteen years later, he's still paying for the storage locker and it's still bothering him that he never returned the motorcycle. His friends in the Shipyard orbiting Pluto convince him to go to Earth and resolve this ghost of his past, once and for all.

Nothing for Fergus is ever that simple. When the key he's been carrying all these years fails to open the storage unit, he hacks it open, only to find no sign of his cousin's motorcycle. Instead, the unit is full of expensive storage crates containing paintings by artists like Van Gogh. They're obviously stolen. Presumably the paintings also explain the irate retired police officer who knocks him out and tries to arrest him, slightly after the urgent message from the Shipyard AI telling him his friends are under attack.

Fergus does not stay arrested, a development that will not surprise readers of the previous book. He does end up with an obsessed and increasingly angry ex-cop named Zacker as an unwanted passenger. Fergus reluctantly cuts a deal with Zacker: assist him in finding out what happened to his friends, and Fergus will then go back to Earth and help track down the art thieves who shot Zacker's daughter.

It will be some time before they get back to Earth. Fergus's friends have been abducted by skilled professionals. What faint clues he can track down point to Enceladus, a moon of Saturn with a vast subsurface ocean. One simulation test with a desperate and untrustworthy employer later, Fergus is now a newly-hired pilot of an underwater hauler.

The trend in recent SFF genre novels has been towards big feelings and character-centric stories. Sometimes this comes in the form of found family, sometimes as melodrama, and often now as romance. I am in general a fan of this trend, particularly as a corrective to the endless engineer-with-a-wrench stories, wooden protagonists, and cardboard characters that plagued classic science fiction. But sometimes I want to read a twisty and intelligent plot navigated by a competent but understated protagonist and built around nifty science fiction ideas. That is exactly what Driving the Deep is, and I suspect this series is going to become my go-to recommendation for people who "just want a science fiction novel."

I don't want to overstate this. Fergus is not a blank slate; he gets the benefit of the dramatic improvement in writing standards and characterization in SFF over the past thirty years. He's still struggling with what happened to him in Finder, and the ending of this book is rather emotional. But the overall plot structure is more like a thriller or a detective novel: there are places to go, people to investigate, bases to infiltrate, and captives to find, so the amount of time spent on emotional processing is necessarily limited. Fergus's emotions and characterization are grace notes around the edges of the plot, not its center.

I thoroughly enjoyed this. Palmer has a light but effective touch with characterization and populates the story with interesting and distinguishable characters. The plot has a layered complexity that allows Fergus to keep making forward progress without running out of twists or getting repetitive. The motivations of the villains were not the most original, but they didn't need to be; the fun of the story is figuring out who the villains are and watching Fergus get out of impossible situations with the help of new friends. Finder was a solid first novel, but I thought Driving the Deep was a substantial improvement in both pacing and plot coherence.

If I say a novel is standard science fiction, that sounds like criticism of lack of originality, but sometimes standard science fiction is exactly what I want to read. Not every book needs to do something wildly original or upend my understanding of story. I started reading science fiction because I loved tense adventures on moons of Saturn with intelligent spaceships and neat bits of technology, and they're even better with polished writing, quietly competent characterization, and an understated sense of humor.

This is great stuff, and there are two more books already published that I'm now looking forward to. Highly recommended when you just want a science fiction novel.

Followed by The Scavenger Door.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Review: Metal from Heaven, by August Clarke

Metal from Heaven is industrial-era secondary-world fantasy with a literary bent. It is a complete story in one book, and I would be very surprised by a sequel. Clarke previously wrote the Scapegracers young-adult trilogy, which got excellent reviews and a few award nominations, as H.A. Clarke. This is his first adult novel.

Know I adore you. Look out over the glow. The cities sundered, their machines inverted, mountains split and prairies blazing, that long foreseen Hereafter crowning fast. This calamity is a promise made to you. A prayer to you, and to your shadow which has become my second self, tucked behind my eye and growing in tandem with me, pressing outwards through the pupil, the smarter, truer, almost bursting reason for our wrath. Do not doubt me. Just look. Watch us rise as the sun comes up over the beauty. The future stains the bleakness so pink. When my violence subsides, we will have nothing, and be champions.

Marney Honeycutt is twelve years old, a factory worker, and lustertouched. She works in the Yann I. Chauncey Ichorite Foundry in Ignavia City, alongside her family and her best friend, shaping the magical metal ichorite into the valuable industrial products of a new age of commerce and industry. She is the oldest of the lustertouched, the children born to factory workers and poisoned by the metal. It has made her allergic, prone to fits at any contact with ichorite, but also able to exert a strange control over the metal if she's willing to pay the price of spasms and hallucinations for hours afterwards.

As Metal from Heaven opens, the workers have declared a strike. Her older sister is the spokesperson, demanding shorter hours, safer working conditions, and an investigation into the health of the lustertouched children. Chauncey's response is to send enforcer snipers to kill the workers, including the entirety of her family.

The girl sang, "Unalone toward dawn we go, toward the glory of the new morning."

An enforcer shot her in the belly, and when she did not fall, her head.

Marney survives, fleeing into the city, swearing an impossible personal revenge against Yann Chauncey. An act of charity gets her a ticket on a train into the countryside. The woman who bought her ticket is a bandit who is on the train to rob it. Marney's ability to control ichorite allows her to help the bandits in return, winning her a place with the Highwayman's Choir who have been preying on the shipments of the rich and powerful and then disappearing into the hills.

The Choir's secret is that the agoraphobic and paranoid Baron of the Fingerbluffs is dead and has been for years. He was killed by his staff, Hereafterist idealists, who have turned his remote territory into an anarchist commune and haven for pirates and bandits. This becomes Marney's home and the Choir becomes her family, but she never forgets her oath of revenge or the childhood friend she left behind in the piles of bodies and to whom this story is narrated.

First, Clarke's writing is absolutely gorgeous.

We scaled the viny mountain jags at Montrose Barony's legal edge, the place where land was and wasn't Ignavia, Royston, and Drustland alike. There was a border but it was diffuse and hallucinatory, even more so than most. On legal papers and state maps there were harsh lines that squashed topography and sanded down the mountains into even hills in planter's rows, but here among the jutting rocks and craggy heather, the ground was lineless.

The rhythm of it, the grasp of contrast and metaphor, the word choice! That climactic word "lineless," with its echo of limitless. So good.

Second, this is the rarest of books: a political fantasy that takes class and religion seriously and uses them for more than plot drivers. This is not at all our world, and the technology level is somewhat ambiguous, but the parallels to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era are unmistakable. The Hereafterists that Marney joins are political anarchists, not in the sense of alternative governance structures and political theory sanitized for middle-class liberals, but in the sense of Emma Goldman and Peter Kropotkin. The society they have built in the Fingerbluffs is temporary, threatened, and contingent, but it is sincere and wildly popular among the people who already lived there.

Even beyond politics, class is a tangible force in this book. Marney is a factory worker and the child of factory workers. She barely knows how to read and doesn't magically learn over the course of the book. She has friends who are clever in the sense rewarded by politics and nobility, who navigate bureaucracies and political nuance, but that is not Marney's world. When, towards the end of the book, she has to deal with a gathering of high-class women, the contrast is stark, and she navigates that gathering only by being entirely unexpected.

Perhaps the best illustration of the subtlety of this is the terminology in the book for lesbian. Marney is a crawly, which is a slur thrown at people like her (and one of the rare fictional slurs that work exactly as the author intended) but is also simply what she calls herself. Whether or not it functions as a slur depends on context, and the context is never hard to understand. The high-class lesbians she meets later are Lunarists, and react to crawly as a vile and insulting word. They use language to separate themselves from both the insult and from the social class that uses it. Language is an indication of culture and manners and therefore of morality, unlike deeds, which admit endless justifications.

Conversation was fleeting. Perdita managed with whomever stood near her, chipper about every prettiness she saw, the flitting butterflies, the dappled light between the leaves, the lushness and the fragrance of untamed land, and her walking companions took turns sharing in her delight. It was infectious, how happy she was. She was going to slaughter millions. She was going to skip like this all the while.

The handling of religion is perhaps even better. Marney was raised a Tullian, which sits alongside two other fleshed-out fictional religions and sketches of several more. Tullians tend to be conservative and patriarchal, and Marney has a realistically complicated relationship with faith: sticking with some Tullian worship practices and gestures because they're part of who she is, feeling a kinship to other Tullians, discarding beliefs that don't fit her, and revising others.

Every major religion has a Hereafterist spin or reinterpretation that upends or reverses the parts of the religion that were used to prop up the existing social order and brings it more in line with Hereafterist ideals. We see the Tullian Hereafterist variation in detail, and as someone who has studied a lot of methods of reinterpreting Christianity, I was impressed by how well Clarke invents both a belief system and its revisionist rewrite. This is exactly how religions work in human history, but one almost never sees this subtlety in fantasy novels.

Marney's allergy to ichorite causes her internal dialogue to dissolve into hallucinatory synesthesia when she's manipulating or exposed to it. Since that's most of the book, substantial portions read like drug trips with growing body horror. I normally hate this type of narration, so it's a sign of just how good Clarke's writing is that I tolerated it and even enjoyed parts. It helps that the descriptions are irreverent and often surprising, full of unexpected metaphors and sudden turns. It's very hard not to quote paragraph after paragraph of this book.

Clarke is also doing a lot with gender that I don't feel qualified to comment in detail on, but it would not surprise me to see this book in the Otherwise Award recommendation list. I can think of three significant male characters, all of whom are well-done, but every other major character is female by at least some gender definition. Within that group, though, is huge gender diversity of the complicated and personal type that doesn't force people into defined boxes. Marney's sexuality is similarly unclassified and sometimes surprising. My one complaint is that I thought the sex scenes (which, to warn, are often graphic) fell into the literary fiction trap of being described so closely and physically that it didn't feel like anyone involved was actually enjoying themselves. (This is almost certainly a matter of personal taste.)

I had absolutely no idea how Clarke was going to end this book, and the last couple of chapters caught me by surprise. I'm still not sure what I think about the climax. It's not the ending that I wanted, but one of the merits of this book is that it never did what I thought I wanted and yet made me enjoy the journey anyway. It is, at least, a genre ending, not a literary ending: The reader gets a full explanation of what is going on, and the setting is not static the way that it so often is in literary fiction. The characters can change the world, for good or for ill. The story felt frustrating and incomplete when I first finished it, but I haven't stopped thinking about this book and I think I like the shape of it a bit more now. It was certainly unexpected, at least by me.

Clarke names Dhalgren as one of their influences in the acknowledgments, and yes, Metal from Heaven is that kind of book. This is the first 2024 novel I've read that felt like the kind of book that should be on award shortlists. I'm not sure it was entirely successful, and there are parts of it that I didn't like or that weren't for me, but it's trying to do something different and challenging and uncomfortable, and I think it mostly worked. And the writing is so good.

She looked like a mythic princess from the old woodcuts, who ruled nature by force of goodness and faith and had no legal power.

Metal from Heaven is not going to be everyone's taste. If you do not like literary fantasy, there is a real chance that you will hate this. I am very glad that I read it, and also am going to take a significant break from difficult books before I tackle another one. But then I'm probably going to try the Scapegracers series, because Clarke is an author I want to follow.

Content notes: Explicit sex, including sadomasochistic sex. Political violence, mostly by authorities. Murdered children, some body horror, and a lot of serious injuries and death.

Rating: 8 out of 10