Review: Wormhole, by Keith Brooke and Eric Brown

Blurb

2110 Earth is suffering major resource shortages, and the impact of climate change is peaking, with much of the planet’s equatorial regions turned to lifeless desert and populations displaced. Colonies have been established on Mars and the Moon, but these cannot hope to sustain any more than a scant population of hundreds of citizens.

Attention has turned to the need to discover an extra-solar colony world. European scientists, using discoveries made at CERN, have identified the means of creating a wormhole in the space-time continuum, which would allow interstellar travel. However, to do so they must first physically transport one end of the wormhole to where they want it to be, so setting up a wormhole will always rely on physical travel first of all.

A ship is sent to Mu Arae, earth-like planet discovered 10 years before. It is a journey that will take 80 years, the crew, who will eventually set up the wormhole on the planet, kept in suspended animation. But only a few years into the trip, catastrophe strikes and the ship blows up en route, killing all aboard.

2190 Eighty years after the starship set out.

Gordon Kemp is a detective working in the cold case department in London. Usually he works on cases closed ten, twenty-five years earlier. Now, however, he has been assigned a murder investigation closed, unsolved, over eighty years ago. What he unearths will change history and threatens everything we know about what the powers that be have planned for Earth.

The tragedy that befell the ship 80 years before is not what it seems and the past and the present are radically different to what everyone on Earth believes.

We made the journey. Why has it been kept a secret?

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Author Bios

ERIC BROWN – Eric Brown is the BSFA award-winning author of more than 20 novels and as many novellas. He has had many short stories published in Interzone magazine and was, for many years, the SF and Fantasy reviewer for The Guardian

KEITH BROOKE – Keith Brooke is the Philip K. Dick award shortlisted author of more than a dozen novels for adults and teenagers. He was the editor for Infinity Plus magazine and has written non-fiction on the SF genre for Palgrave Macmillan.

My Review

This was an unexpected delivery last week; I actually forgot I’d requested it, so it was a nice surprise while I was sick (I still am sick – can’t get rid of a cold).

It was a slow start getting into this book, but then one night I was going to go to bed early. Yeah, that didn’t happen. Four hours after I planned to go to bed, I put the book down, finished.

Gordon is an older detective in a London that’s boiling in summer and freezing in winter, where Chinese food and organisations have become the default, and he’s stuck in the cold cases division of the London Police. He’s got a much younger D.I. named Danni, a Lawyer friend who goes for a pint with him when he’s depressed and a growing belly. One day, Danni and Gordon are handed an extremely cold case, the murder of a scientist in Geneva 80 years before. It’s an odd case, there’s no reason for it to be reopened as all the suspects are dead.

Except they’re not and new evidence has come to light.

A suspect, the wife of the murder victim, was aboard a space ship bound for a planet 50 lightyears away, and now it’s arrived at its destination. Except everyone thought the ship had been destroyed on the way out of the solar system. Danni is charged with going to Mu Arae to arrest the suspect, return her to Earth and the investigation team.

Gordon and Danni know something is off about this whole case, but they can’t work out what. When Danni realises she’s pregnant, Gorgon has to take her place and travel through the wormhole to an alien world. What he finds there is not what anyone expected. Meanwhile, Danni takes sick leave and joins up with Ed (the lawyer) and Martin (a tech wizard) to investigate precisely what is going on, and track down any witnesses to the original case.

It’s a crime thriller set in the future, with tech that’s possibly possible and tech that will probably never happen. I like and dislike the idea of the imps; all that access to information with the blink of an eye; all that potential for nefarious organisations like governments to steal data and mess with your brain.

I thought Martin was a great character, with his collection of ‘obsolete’ tech, that turns out to be useful and his complicated relationship with Ed. I though the development of the romantic relationships between Danni and Ed, and Gordon and Jayne, in their different environments, as they investigate and form teams, was fun. Almost getting killed repeatedly will bond people together. Rima is an interesting character; you assume the secret she’s keeping is that she murdered her husband, but it’s something else that helps crack the case. Her relationship with Creasey, the Mu Arae 3 sapient who helps her survive, is touching.

The description of the alien world, that looks a bit like Earth from space but is very much not Earth-like once you’re there, was amazing. The almost sentient vegetation and the fluid sentients, the microbe filled atmosphere and the polyps that attached to any surface! Actually, they made me shudder. I also got the creeps from the description of Rima (suspect) covered in growths after she takes her suit off. It’s entirely sensible, humans get parasites and funguses on Earth, and we’re immune to some of them, or at least we have some defences; I’d imagine on a new planet humans would be colonised quickly by any microbial life.

The plot is a little complicated, but at the same time I guessed some of the ‘surprises’ and red herrings as I read, so it’s not that complicated. It does keep driving forward and is quite action-packed at times.

The book also has corporate greed and corruption as a theme. The abuse of science in the pursuit of personal gain is explored through the characters of Randolph and the Major. They are the villains of the piece, watch out for them.

I enjoyed both the sci fi and crime elements of this book, the minutia of sending an expedition to a new planet and setting up a safe way to interact with the planet, the look into a potential future for Earth and the consequences of our actions in the here and now. We can’t just hope something will come along and fix everything, or that we’ll find another planet and run away. There is no where to run to.