Red Star Hustle / Apprehension by Sam J. Miller/Mary Robinette Kowal

 

I was too young for the era of the Ace Doubles - volumes with two short books in them bound back to back - so I have no nostalgia for the format. However, I love Mary Robinette Kowal, and I’ve enjoyed the books by Sam J Miller, that I have read, so I was intrigued by this interesting publishing experiment. I received an eARC from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review, so I cannot comment on how the physical book works as an object. 

I had heard of Sam J. Miller when his Blackfish City was nominated for a Nebula but I still haven’t gotten around to reading it, but I did really enjoy his short story collection Boys, Beasts & Men. The stories in that collection ran the gamut from scary to angry to sad to kind but they all had a raw humanity that I loved. 

Red Star Hustle seemed like it was trying to achieve that same feeling, but it fell short. A skillful author can do wonders with tropes, but it’s a tricky tight rope to walk. It’s easy to fall into the pitfalls that make them tropes in the first place. I fear that Mr. Miller did not succeed in rehabilitating the “ hooker with a heart of gold” trope, and none of his characters felt particularly real in this book. None of the addiction narratives rang true, and I didn’t enjoy the time I spent in this world with these characters because none of them were particularly interesting and I didn’t really care about what happened to them. If I had gotten this book by itself, I would’ve felt a little bit disappointed.

I have loved Mary Robinette Kowal ever since I devoured the Calculating Stars. (Actually, I fell in love with her writing before that - she wrote a blog post on tor dot com before that book came out about her visit to NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab that was just amazing and has stuck with me for years.) I loved the Fated Sky even more than the Calculating Stars, and I was a little frustrated when the book ended when they reached Mars and we didn’t get anything of the trip home. I adored the Relentless Moon and the Martian Contingency and was thrilled to get a book signed by her at NYCC a few years ago. 

I really, really liked Apprehension, Ms. Kowal’s half of this double feature. It are really fun adventure of spies and a kidnapped kid and his plucky grandmother who helps rescue him. I thought the disability of the protagonist was handled much better here than in the authors prior book, the Spare Man, and I would’ve enjoyed spending much more time in this world with these characters. I hope we see them again.