David Ramirez, The Forever Watch (2014)

An intriguing debut, this: part generation starship story, part urban noir policier, part wizard duel extravaganza. Earth is ruined; the last survivors departed for the stars centuries ago on a vast spaceship called ‘Noah’, a craft which is now about a third of the way along its millennial journey to a new star. Life on board is Nineteen eighty four-ish: all but the elite ‘mission critical’ senior crew living grim, functional lives, everywhere observed and regulated. Indeed, with the neural implants everyone wears surveillance reaches down to the level of individual’s thoughts and feelings. Our narrator, Hana Dempsey, is bit-part player in the ship’s ubiquitous, controlling bureaucracy, and the main story concerns her investigation of a horrible murder—so, like Al Reynold’s recent Blue Remembered Earth, this novel is in part about the commission and investigation of violent crime in a world where crime, and the avoidance of detection, really ought to be impossible. As she investigates, Dempsey uncovers layers of secrecy, conspiracy and monstrosity.

I thought this novel began poor but ended strong: after a clotted and misfiring opening quarter it settles into a more assured stride which then built to a gripping and powerful, even devastating, conclusion. That’s not (ye budding authors out there hardly need to be told this) the ideal way around, especially for a debut, but it evidently didn’t put Hodder off from acquiring the title. And it shouldn’t put you off, gentle reader: stick with it, and the pay off at the end is richly worth it.

What’s wrong with the opening? Well the first few pages (in which Hana wakes up having done her civic duty by giving birth to a baby which, according to the oppressive rules of the ship, she is not allowed even to see) is fine; but then there’s a long period in which the novel strains to get the reader up to speed with the intricate worldbuilding required for the rest of the novel to work: the nature of the ship, the implants, the psi-powers that those implants augment, the hierarchy of things, what is permitted and what not. This is something of a slog, and it includes what strikes me as the novel’s major misstep. Hana’s boyfriend is a big lug ex-army policeman (or ‘Enforcer’) type called Barrens. In an early scene Hana is horribly and gratuitously raped by a ‘senior engineer’ called Holmheim, who gloats that since he is mission critical he will suffer no consequences for his assault. Then Barrens comes along, after the rape, and beats Holmheim bloody. This in turn leads to a physically passionate (which is to say: violent) sexual relationship between Barrens and Hana predicated in part upon his innate animality ‘when he is It and primal’ (‘he has seen me at my moment of deepest shame, grimy and befouled and betrayed in an alleyway … he holds me down when he is It and primal … when It is taking me with the force and speed of an avalanche marking me with his teeth and his claws we howl together, flushed and breathless’). All this struck a false note, I thought; a failure of tact as well as taste. But things certainly improve. The relationship between Hana and Barrens is compelling enough to enable the plot twist (can she trust him?) and twist again (of course). The discovery that humans did not originally build the Noah is only the first of several well handled reveals, building to the Big Secret about the mission. The sweep of the Rebellion Against Big Brother narrative arc is well developed, and the end is no anticlimax.