Mercy for Hire Mission Pack 1: Missions 1-4 by
J.S. Morin
My rating:
4 of 5 stars
Something a bit different, and I'm always looking out for that. A bounty hunter who is a self-described vigilante samaritan - she goes around helping people who need it, often a little bit outside the law. Yes, it's kind of like a supers story in some ways, or how a supers story should work if the vigilantism isn't tolerated by the authorities, but it doesn't feel that way. It's its own thing.
The worldbuilding is mostly off-the-shelf classic space opera: blasters (with a stun setting), FTL ships, alien races who look like anthropomorphic animals (turtles, monkeys, cats, wolves and dogs, probably a few others). Earth seems to be the center of a multispecies polity named ARGO, an acronym that is never defined (nor is it the only undefined acronym); there's the usual spectrum from civilized core worlds with sprawling megacities where, implausibly, trees are now rare to more-or-less anarchic and thinly settled frontier worlds, mimicking the 19th-century US in many ways. Because of the easy FTL, different planets feel more like states or countries. They're mostly Earthlike, more or less, either naturally or by terraforming, and their alienness is not very marked for the most part. It's set in 2562, and I found the differences and similarities to our present day moderately believable; it wasn't just the 21st century with interplanetary travel and blasters, though it also wasn't so vastly different as to feel alienating (or, to me, highly realistic, given the amount of change there's been in the past 500 years). It does make the common space opera mistake of referring to a constellation (Orion, in this case) as a "system," rather than realizing that constellations are just stars that happen to be in the same direction from Earth at widely varying distances, some of them being further from some of the others than they are from us.
Unlike the very classic style of space opera originating from the 1950s, there is a version of the Internet called the Omni. There are also wizards. These are people who have learned to convince the universe that their opinions about how things work override the normal laws of physics. The magic isn't Sandersonian - we don't know exactly what it can and can't do - so it can operate as a bit of a get-out-of-jail-free card, but its use is limited by two factors. First, it disrupts nearby tech, and wizards also find tech hard to use, which in a technological civilization is inherently a problem for them. Second, in the case of Esper, the specific wizard who's the protagonist, if she goes flinging too much magic around it will attract the attention of the powerful Conclave of Wizards, who are looking for her in an unfriendly manner.
One feature of the worldbuilding that was mostly done well was the made-up future pop culture. It always annoys me when, with some kind of feeble excuse or none at all, books set in the future have no pop culture references from after the time in which they're written. It's not that hard to make up something convincing, and these books do. The author occasionally fails to resist the temptation to use a joke name that's a present-day reference, though.
The worldbuilding feature I found hard (in fact, impossible) to swallow was that Christianity has reunited into the One Church, rather than continuing to split like a cheap pair of trousers every time someone gets overexcited. Apparently, the author hasn't been given the sects talk: "When one fanatic hates another fanatic very much..."
Part of Esper's backstory is that the One Church took her in at a difficult time of her life, and she even became a priestess (the idea that a woman can become a priest conflicts with the firmly old-fashioned viewpoint of the one priest we see). She later left, for reasons that aren't gone into much, and joined a mostly good-hearted group of criminals, from which she's now largely independent; this is where she learned wizardry. She fights, very effectively, using magic to enhance herself so that she can practice the wuxia-like martial arts of the four-handed monkey people's movies.
When she left, she took her sidekick Kubu with her. He's a sentient alien who looks very doglike, if a dog weighed 9 tonnes, and she has magicked him semi-permanently into the size of a very large but believable dog. It's repeatedly emphasized by both of them that he isn't a dog, but he thinks and behaves very like one, except that he's sentient. He's young, not yet an adult, and rather naive, and Esper tries, with limited success, to keep from exposing him to bad influences (given that she hangs out with criminals and other social outcasts on a regular basis).
This pack contains Esper's first four (documented) adventures. The first involves rescuing a poor little rich girl who is the subject of a custody battle between her parents, a retired pirate and his bitter, nasty wife. The 16-year-old girl is cynical and jaded, reminding Esper of herself at the same age, and she attempts to mentor her, with some eventual success.
In the second, Esper goes to a remote planet to hide out from the numerous people she's annoyed, and can't resist getting involved in helping a man who, as an offworlder, is being persecuted by the tight-knit supposedly-utopian community he has married into. She wants justice for him, but it's hard to obtain when everyone believes the insiders over the outsider.
In the third, Esper, still trying to hide out from the Conclave of Wizards and various other people, gets a job as security for a brothel, and goes all crusadey when one of the women who works there is trafficked to another planet by a gangster. She leaves Kubu behind for this one, and he has his own adventures. I found it disturbing in a few different ways, and genuinely suspenseful.
The fourth adventure starts with Esper still trying to avoid the Convocation, in an escalating series of confrontations which test her moral boundaries.
(view spoiler)[She is eventually captured, and put on trial for both her own actions and those of her mentor, who took over her body at one point and killed people. (hide spoiler)]Finally, we have a short story which is entirely dispensable.
Apart from the final short, the complexity and tension of the challenges gradually ratchet up over the collection, which is good.
Apart from
a bad habit of dangling modifiers and an occasional misplaced apostrophe when the noun is plural, and using "nonplussed" in the exact opposite sense to what it means, the author's mechanics are mostly good. That's refreshing to see, especially from a book I bought through BookBub. There's a bit more depth to the characters and their backstories than I often see, as well, and the protagonist is driven by a complex set of motivations, chiefly by wanting to do the right thing and protect the vulnerable and more-or-less innocent against the powerful and ill-intentioned. Operating on or beyond the edge of the law, she's in a morally complex position, and the author doesn't shy away from exploring that, or the darker thoughts that come to her when she's going vigilante. Her wins against socially embedded evil are, realistically, not absolute, but are big enough to be satisfying, and there are consequences for her when she defies something bigger than she is. The action scenes are good, too.
Overall, despite the mostly off-the-shelf and sometimes implausible worldbuilding and some missing polish, the character work and plotting are strong enough to almost (not quite) take it to five stars for me, and I'll watch out for more from this series and this author.
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Calculated Whisk by Lindsay Buroker
