Jack Glass

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Jack Glass by Adam Roberts

I was quite blown away with this book. I came to it not expecting much, but it had a wealth of ideas, some attractive characters and tight plotting that made the book stand out.

The book is actually a short story and a two-part novella. In the short story, a handful of criminals are dumped onto an asteroid with rudimentary technology. They have been sentenced to remain on the asteroid for eleven years, during which time they must transform the asteroid into a hollowed out sphere, which will then be sold as housing. If they don't hollow out the sphere, they won't find ice and create room for themselves. It is a harrowing existence.

The two weakest members of the group are prey for the others. It turns out that one of the two has a secret that the government who put him on the asteroid want, and it will be back shortly to take him and get the secret.

The short story turns into how someone escapes from an inescapable prison.

The novella shifts to a story about two young sisters who are visiting Earth. We learn a bit about the strange culture that has evolved with great families ruling different sectors of human space. Humanity is limited to the Solar Systems and numbers in the trillions. Trillions of people live around the sun in flimsy bubbles. There are so many of these bubbles that it affects the spectrum of light received on Earth. The great mass of humanity is impoverished, while the ruling families live in technological luxury.

The older sister, Eva, is immersed in discovering the mystery of “Champagne Supernovas,” which are a real thing that occurs when a small star explodes in a supernova that generates far more energy than its size should allow. The younger sister, Dian, is fascinated by solving murders. A murder lands in her lap before her 16th birthday. The solution seems obvious, but there are warnings that the notorious murderer Jack Glass is involved. And there is something about some scientific discovery.

The second part of the novella takes Dia off planet with her mentor Iago. As they flee various enemies, they are involved with a strange death that has to involve an impossible gun or an impossible bullet.

More than that I will not say.

I loved the world-creation of the gritty reality that Adam Roberts sketches. I loved the way he worked science into his story. Finally, I particularly enjoyed the writing which was smart and occasionally very funny.

A complaint is that the book ends midpoint. The book was clearly intended to set up a second book, but this one was written in 2012 and as near as I can tell, it hasn't come out.

Actually, paused. I don't seem to get anywhere with this one. I did read a sizeable chunk, and it was interesting, but also creepy. I may come back to it some day.

You can also read this review of Jack Glass over at my blog Be More Book

I've given it 4, but it's more a 3.5.

Important point number one... I pretty much chose to buy this book because of the front cover. It's just gorgeous!

The book is laid out in 3 sections – In the Box, The FTL Murders and The Impossible Gun. Jack Glass is involved in all three of the sections and it's up to you to try and work out in what capacity he has been able to get himself involved (which you follow through with the characters of course). I felt that each of the three sections had a very different tone. I've never read any of Roberts' works before, but the way he made the three sections sound so different but at the same time still follow the previous sections, was an indication of the calibre of writer that Roberts is.

The story is set in the distant future, where space/asteroids have become densly populated in “shanty bubbles”, but there is still a big divide between the rich and poor, as well as there still being religious divides. The stories take place in a mix of off-world and on-world contexts, with Earth being a place that now only the mega-rich are able to visit or live on. Each section centres around a murder and the mystery to be solved is was how the murder was achieved. I think that Roberts has divised some very interesting ideas, and achieved what he set out to do in creating a sci-fi/detective book. The characters are well written, and fairly interesting, the characters of note being Jac, Diana, Iago and Eva. Jac is awesome. I dislike Diana, but I felt in some ways you were meant to. Iago was excellent, and Eva too I disliked but felt I was meant to.

However. I was not a massive fan of the book. I enjoyed the majority of it. Particularly the first part (be aware there are some pretty gruesome/graphic parts in this first section), the second and third sections were pretty good. They had some great ideas and interesting and surprising plot points, as well as at times trying to tackle some big questions in the science world (e.g. could we ever travel faster than the speed of light?) and in the reality of politics. I had two major bugbears for the book though:

1. Although an interesting idea, using dream sequences to play out parts of the mysteries in order to solve them, seemed a tad too easy a way of explaining it

2. The very ending was atrocious.

Point number 2 is what brought it down from a 4.5 to a 3.5 for me. I know a lot of people wouldn't feel the same as I do about the ending, so I would definitely encourage people to read it regardless! I would also still pick up some more of Roberts' work at a later date.