Jeff Duntemann's ContraPositive Diary

William Langewiesche's cover story for the September 2003 Atlantic ("Anarchy at Sea") was a riveting description of high-seas piracy as it happens now. None of this "arrrrr, matey" stuff. It's about multiply nested shell corporations, illusory ship registrations, an utter lack of law enforcement on the high seas, and (especially) assault rifles. Although I've read of "space pirates" in cheap novels for forty years, all of them have leaned toward the kind of nitwit romanticism that has ultimately given us Pirates of the Caribbean and a lot of funny hats.

Not this one.

Chris Gerrib's first novel is about space piracy in a near future (the 2070s) in which commerce among Earth, Mars, and certain asteroids has become routine. The story is told from the point of view of a 19-year-old girl whose disfunctional family cannot help her with conventional college tuition, so she enlists in a sort of space merchant marine academy and becomes a bottom-rung astronaut. On her first run to Mars her merchant ship is attacked by pirates, and she is given a choice: Join us as a pirate, or die on the spot. She joins, intending to escape as soon as possible, and travels on to Mars and back to Earth, where she spends some time in the pathetic Central African Empire (a real country of sorts, albeit one where the emperor had the bad habit of eating his subjects) which is creating a spit-and-baling-wire space navy specifically to prey on spacecraft from developed nations, including the US. Janet eventually triumphs, but it's a difficult, degrading road, which sees several abortive escape attempts and some time spent as a sex slave of the son of the pirate ringleader.

This is a first novel, and for a first novel (I've read more than a few) it works quite well. Chris is a Navy man and has spent considerable time on shipboard, so his descriptions of the nuts'n'bolts of long-haul space travel ring very true. He also has an intuitive grasp of the criminal mind, and we get a clear picture of the pirates as reckless, clumsy opportunists who succeed by a small measure of skill and a great deal of luck—which eventually (as with all criminal luck) runs out.

The great flaw of the book is actually a shortcoming of the medium: We have a size eight novel built on a size six frame. The story sucked me in and moved me along, but there was a bare-bones feeling about it, and I kept wanting more of the background of the future that he's painting here. Janet Pilgrim's character development was present and adequate, but I felt that, given her circumstances, I would have liked to know more about the woman she rapidly becomes once she leaves the Earth. Even with her as the viewpoint character, a great deal happens "off stage."

After talking about it with Chris, the explanation was clear, and something entirely new in SF publishing: The constraints of the print-on-demand publishing medium. The Mars Run was published through Lulu.com, where the unit manufacturing cost (UMC) is directly proportional to the page count. Chris calculated the length of the novel that would allow him to make money while keeping the cover price in line with conventionally published trade paperback SF, and he wrote to that length. As I discovered while writing The Cunning Blood, a given story wants to be told at a given length: What I had hoped would be a 90,000 word novel turned out to be 145,000 words instead. Chris found the discipline to keep the word count down, but at the cost of the story's backdrop fading into a necessary indistinctness.

That's really a vote of confidence from me. The action was straight-line and almost continuous, once we got past a slightly slow beginning. I would gladly have read it at twice the length. There's only one caution: Although the protagonist is only 19, the story has some very violent moments and there is a fair bit of explicit sex, so it is not something you should hand to young readers.

And one other interesting note: Lulu sells the book both in printed form and as a PDF-based ebook. I bought both, and read the novel twice, once in each medium. (I read the PDF on my Thinkpad X41 tablet while shivering in the corner of our unheated RV on our peculiar, blizzard-haunted "late summer" camping trip up in the mountains.) The PDF is DRM-free and sells for only $2.68, and you get it Right Now. (Shipping time for the print edition is perhaps a day or two slower than what you'd see with Amazon.) I was interested in seeing how good Lulu's order fulfillment is, and was very happy with the results.

187 pages. Paperback $10.96. Ebook $2.68. ISBN 978-1-4116-9973-1.