Review: Jitterbug

Jitterbug by Gareth L. Powell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have several of Gareth L. Powell's books. He has written series in the past, but his last couple of books have been standalones, which is a good thing in my mind. (Just looking at Brandon Sanderson's fifty-pound bricks exhausts me.) That continues to be the case with this book, a one-and-done space opera with a few timey-wimey twists at the end.

This story also falls in the category of....I don't know if you could really call it Big Dumb Objects, because the objects that make up what Powell calls the Swirl are actually pretty interesting. They're the remnants of the outer planets (Pluto, the Oort Cloud, Neptune, Saturn and Jupiter) which were taken apart by--something--a hundred years ago and re-formed into several segments facing and orbiting the Sun. These segments are so unimaginably huge (hundreds of millions of miles long and wide) that they hold their own atmospheres and are inhabitable. In fact, humanity has begun doing just that: leaving Earth and Luna and settling on these segments, building towns and planting crops and making lives for themselves. (Since Mars is also unraveling and humans don't have the slightest idea how this is done or how to stop it, the unspoken horrific expectation is that eventually Earth will be taken apart as well and the Swirl will be the only place humans can live.) The Swirl has become the Wild West of the outer solar system, a place where people can disappear into a segment that can hold a million Earths and never be found again.

Our main POV character is Copernicus Brown, the captain of the titular sentient starship Jitterbug and a bounty hunter who tracks down the outlaws who attempt to disappear into the Swirl. Following a successful bounty, Copernicus and his crew are on their way back to Luna when they run across a ship under attack by pirates. They divert to render assistance, only to discover when they get there that both the ship who called for help and the pirate ship have been taken apart by an unseen third vessel that cut them both open like tin cans and disappeared. The Jitterbug comes under attack by one of the last survivors of the pirates and one of her crew members is killed. Upon scanning the mangled ships another survivor is found hiding in a water tank. Copernicus goes to set this person free, and finds a woman calling herself Amber Roth who is claiming to be a captive of the pirates and who attempted to escape. But Amber Roth has secrets of her own, as evidenced when the Jitterbug scans her and sees an encrypted data crystal in her stomach, which she apparently swallowed when the pirates attacked.

This one fateful decision sets the plot in motion, as Copernicus and the Jitterbug's crew soon realize they have stumbled upon a system-wide conspiracy involving the higher-ups at the Solar Assembly, the organization tasked with managing the Swirl and space travel. This chip holds evidence that something is coming, that a huge object a thousand miles wide is on its way insystem. The Jitterbug and her crew are tracked down by the Deputy Speaker of the Solar Assembly, Danielle Lanzo, and tasked with meeting this object, which the Solar Assembly thinks may be an alien ship, for first contact. But there are other players who wish to get there first, and the plot becomes a race between the Jitterbug and these other players, some of whom are willing to kill to protect their place in line.

The final third of the book details Copernicus Brown and his ship meeting the alien object, and the reveal involves the timey-wimey shenanigans I spoke of earlier. There are also other aliens inbound to Earth, a locust-like species that strips planets of every resource, murders the inhabitants, and leaves the solar system with nothing but burned ruins behind. Copernicus and the Jitterbug (or a couple different alternate versions of them) are trying to rescue the human race.

As usual with this author, the sentient starship Jitterbug is a major player in her own right. Powell likes several alternating first-person viewpoints in his stories, and in this one there are clear differences between the characters and their voices (especially Danielle Lanzo's). Some of the ideas in this book could have actually used more room to explore, but this story, also typical of Powell, is a lean and mean 300 pages.

I think my favorite work of Powell's is still his Embers of War trilogy, but this one is right up there. If you're a fan of space opera, you won't go wrong with this.

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