Disposable Lit Reviews

Avon Books, 1991
250 pp.
ISBN 0-380-75852-0

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Diane Duane first impinged upon my awareness with a couple of Star Trek novels which were probably the most ambitious and exciting of the “regular” novels, before Pocket Books started releasing giant “event” Star Trek novels. Her husband, Peter Morwood, is a fantasy novelist who… well, I’ve never read any of them, but that’s more because of my twenty-year burnout on fantasy. This novel, Mindblast, was the kickoff for the new packaged property Space Cops (licensed by Bill Fawcett & Associates). According to my research, the franchise made it through two more installments with the same authors over the next eighteen months before petering out.

I think part of the problem was that the title proclaims it to be a space opera, much more sci-fi than SF. But the novel is much more ambitious than that; it’s not immortal and rigorous hard SF, but it does stay grounded in reality far more than the title would suggest. It’s also far more “Cop” than “Space,” being essentially a police procedural of the not-too-distant future. In other words, the people who would enjoy this novel are exactly the people who aren’t going to pick up something entitled “Space Cops: Mindblast.”

Officer Joss O’Bannion is a member of the Solar Patrol born and raised on the moon. His new partner, Evan Glyndower, is a massive Welshman made more massive by the impervious and well-armed armor he wears on duty. They’re a “brain-and-brawn” team, brought together to follow up the investigation by Evan’s former partner of industrial espionage aboard an L5 station — an investigation which ended abruptly when said former partner was murdered.

Once aboard the L5 “Freedom,” they discover a corrupt local police force, an infrastructure fraying around the edges, gangs that have free run of the “downlevel” sections of the station, and drugs. Yes, the go-to explanation of contemporary crime novels show up here as “blast,” an illicit substance which gives the user’s brain a clarity and speed that makes their un-blasted state seem plodding and stupid. It’s technically not physically addictive, but it is psychologically; what’s more, blast damages the neural receptors impacts, forcing the user to take greater and greater doses for the same effect, until it causes irreparable and fatal damage.

As the book progressed, I got a sinking feeling: This was turning into a mystery novel, an open whodunit trying to find the mastermind behind the blast smuggling, who would in turn be the old partner’s killer. The problem is that, as mysteries go, it wasn’t a very good one; the goal kept changing — from finding the killer to finding the source of the industrial data leak to finding the source of the blast — and a crucial character is only introduced by happenstance three-quarters of the way through the book, with just the right details surrounding him that the reader can immediately guess just how the whole scheme comes together around him in about thirty seconds, while it takes the space cops another fifty pages before someone explains it to them.

The relationship between Joss and Evan is easygoing and humorous, and probably grew naturally out of the interplay between the American Duane and the Irish Morwood. As a kicker-offer meant to establish the two main continuing characters, though, the relationship is a problem. Despite their partnership being characterized early on as a “brain-and-brawn” team, there’s not a lot of difference between Joss’ and Evan’s intelligence or temperament. Both are highly competent and casually witty. Joss is the viewpoint character, and wonder several times if Evan will make the case more about revenging his old partner than stopping the espionage, but Evan shows so few indications of doing so that Joss comes off more like an imaginative yenta in his worrying; and the subplot eventually fizzles away. Joss also has that most annoying and contrived hobby in futuristic fiction, a fixation on 20th-century pop culture and entertainment. Blech.

It’s a competent novel by two professionals, but it doesn’t offer the whiz-bang of space opera, the intellectual rigor of hard SF, the gadgetry of technoporn or military SF, or the familiarity of a licensed property that had already made its mark in another medium. All I can see that the franchiser brought to the table is second-guessing and hamstringing the abilities of a couple of writers who could have done better on their own.