The Golden Gate by Robert Buettner

Published by Baen Books on January 3, 2017

The Golden Gate imagines a near future in which Homeland Security is not an ineffective bureaucratic nightmare. Obviously, this is a work of fiction.

The early chapters of The Golden Gate follow Ben Shepard’s underwater search for an experimental car that was blown off the Golden Gate Bridge by an explosion that may or may not have been the work of terrorists. The rich car owner, Manny Colibri, was financing life extension technologies and some people think the explosion might be linked to those efforts. Subsequent chapters have reporter Kate Boyle investigating the attack upon the rich guy, with occasional encouragement from her politically incorrect father, Jack Boyle.

The novel intermittently flashes back to 1588, to the early nineteenth century, and to World War II. Historical artifacts (a helmet used by the conquistadors, a whaling harpoon, a child’s necklace) enter the story in the present after appearing in stories from the past.

The main plot has Kate and Jack and Ben Shepard trying to figure out who would benefit from Colibri’s death. Shepard and the Boyles and the reader are challenged to figure out who is behind the apparent conspiracy and how it ties into the artifacts. Only late in the book — too late, I think — does Robert Buettner make it clear why this is a science fiction novel. Until that point, the story seems like a Dan Brown novel. Still, the reader will puzzle out the carefully concealed sf element long before it is revealed. It’s just a bit too obvious, making the effort to conceal it a waste of words.

Occasional scenes, particularly one that takes place in Iraq to develop Shepard’s backstory and another that’s set in a concentration camp, are intense and dramatic. Other scenes, including one that details the technology involved in an underwater search, come across as attempts to pad the story. Buettner is at his best when he writes about the horrors of war, but much of the story is slow and does little to advance the plot or to develop the characters.

There’s some political nonsense in this novel I could have lived without. Buettner’s central characters seem to believe that an honest insult is always preferable to “politically correct” respectful behavior. At some point, adults should outgrow the need to be obnoxious or disrespectful in their honesty. When writers (via their characters) feel the need to ridicule people who hold political beliefs that differ from their own, their lack of intellectual tolerance degrades the story. That’s particularly true in science fiction, a genre that teaches the importance of diverse and unorthodox opinions (although tolerance seems to be a vanishing commodity in sf fandom in recent years).

So Buettner loses some points for celebrating narrow-mindedness and for assuming that all Latinos in California know how to get a fake social security number. He loses more points for setting a novel in the future where people complain about hippies. I think the last confirmed sighting of a hippie was in 1973. People who write sf should really try to be more creative.

Pieces of The Golden Gate are good. There are some intense action scenes, but they are few and far between. Too much of the novel drags and the characters are unidimensional. The ending is anticlimactic and a little sappy. For all those reasons, I can only give The Golden Gate a guarded recommendation.

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