Summer’s End by John Van Stry (book review).

Dave had to work through college, so his grades aren’t great. All he wants is to translate his engineering credentials into passage off Earth and maybe find his fortune. Then the stepfather he’s never met runs for senator, and Dave is deemed to be inconvenient politically. With a contract out on his life, Dave has to take the first berth he can find and get off the planet. The Iowa Hill is old, barely crewed, and takes jobs the bigger corporations don’t bother with.

I wanted to like this book, ‘Summer’s End’ by John Van Stry. It was easy to slip through the prose and into the world Van Stry created, and I read it in three days, but…

What is Dave’s goal? The blurb had me believing he would be ‘on the run from assassins’. Instead, it’s ‘assassin turns up, kills assassin, then plans engineering training’. I just didn’t feel engaged with Dave’s progress, even when he was being beaten up as much as a noir detective. The beating didn’t seem to affect him at all, so it never felt like anything was at stake. Everything kept meandering away from the action to discuss how to get your level 3 engineering license or the costs associated with running a tramp freighter in this economy.

Dave kept suddenly revealing things about himself that just hadn’t come up, like: Surprise! I used to stab people with an icepick for a gang back on Earth. Surprise! My brother has been faking a horribly degenerative disease to hide a massive scientific breakthrough. I hesitate to call Dave an unreliable narrator. There is a slight hint of his past in the opening chapter, but then nothing. Perhaps his lack of shock and awe at the assassin being shot in front of him in chapter four gives a clue, but it is seriously undermined by the subsequent conversation about never having touched a gun before. Is he a nice guy with a face you just trust automatically, or a soulless killer?

The setting is interesting, with extreme capitalism and social hierarchies on Earth, with the rest of the solar system being a more ‘brave new frontier, but it’s also familiar. ‘The Expanse’, ‘Alien,’ the ‘Murderbot Diaries,’ even Anne McCaffrey’s ‘Brainship’ series all have elements of this capitalistic corporation of space colonisation. I really enjoy the ‘Firefly’ vibe of a tramp freighter’s rascally crew fighting the Man for the greater good, I really do. I wanted to like ‘Summer’s End’ but it just failed to deliver for me.

If you remember Heinlein fondly, you’ll probably like this book. Dave doesn’t get up to any incest, but he does get a’slave girl’ girlfriend bioengineered to be hot and horny. So, that’s something.

LK Richardson

January 2024

(pub: Baen, 2023. 496 page small enlarged paperback. Price: $17.00 (US). ISBN: 978-1-98219-229-7)

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