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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Undercurrents by Robert Buettner

Published by Baen on July 5, 2011

Undercurrents is the second novel in the Orphan's Legacy series. The Orphan's Legacy series is set in the same universe as, and is a successor to, Robert Buettner's Jason Wander series.

Kit Born, a United States Army colonel assigned to special operations, is violating the Human Union Charter by conducting surveillance upon the planet Tressel. She hopes to determine why military officers in Tressen (one of Tressel's two nations) are collaborating with military officers from the planet Yavet. Unfortunately for Kit, she's captured by the Yavi and held by Major Ruberd Polian, Yavet's ranking military officer on Tressel pending the arrival of General Gill. Point of view then shifts to that of Jazen Parker, a retired special ops officer who owns a tavern on Mousetrap. Jazen is recruited to complete Kit's mission on Tressel. He reluctantly agrees to resume his military career only because a secondary objective of the mission is to locate Kit. As far as Jazen is concerned, his mission is to rescue his former lover.

In the best tradition of action fiction, things go wrong for Jazen from the start. In a scene that is reminiscent of Starship Troopers, Jazen plunges to the surface of Tressel from an orbiting ship. His insertion doesn't go as planned, leaving Jazen injured and isolated as he struggles with amphibians that want to turn him into lunch. Soon after that he finds himself fleeing from Major Polian and the Tressen navy. At some point the chapters begin to alternate between Jazen's first person account of his actions and third person descriptions of the events surrounding Polian and Gill. The Polian/Gill chapters eventually reveal the reason for the Yavi's sudden interest in Tressel.

Tressel is a sparsely populated planet but members of its two nations -- the Tressens and the Iridians -- have hated each other for centuries. The Tressens oppress the Iridians by denying them the right to own property and to procreate. The Iridians rebel as best they can. Jazen needs Iridian support to spy on the Tressens and to that end he is assisted by a one-handed man named Pyt and an eleven-year-old girl named Alia. They are charged with leading Jazen to the Iridian rebel leader, Celline, who -- like Princess Leia -- is descended from royalty.

Unlike Pyt, Alia, and Celline, Polian and Gill are interesting characters. Polian has the sense of honor and duty that are standard in military science fiction, but he's also plagued by insecurity. Gill, unlike Polian, has reservations about Yavet's policy of controlling population growth by killing illegal newborns. Polian favors torture while Gill insists on playing by the rules. Neither one trusts the other and there may be good reason for the mistrust. The conflict between the characters adds a bit of needed depth to the story.

Jazen is less interesting. He is a "Trueborn" (his parents are from Earth) but he was born illegally on Yavet, never knew his parents, and spent his young life trying to avoid extermination. Despite that background, Jazen is a stock "reluctant warrior" character, unhappy to be uprooted from a life of relative peace and returned to the landscape of battle. Given his background (he identifies neither with the Yavi nor the Truebloods), Jazen is a surprisingly dull guy. Kit is virtually a nonentity; she's there to give Jazen something to do. Kit exudes a shallow idealism that is supposed to conflict with Jazen's pragmatic desire to keep her safe. It isn't convincing. As is usually true of military science fiction, however, the characters in Undercurrent are secondary to the plot-driven story.

Three minor gripes: (1) Gill asks Polian a number of basic questions about the reason for Yavi collaboration with the Tressens. While the ensuing dialog educates the reader, it makes no sense that Gill wouldn't have that information before assuming command of the Yavi operation. (2) Saddling Jazen with a wise-beyond-her-years eleven-year-old spying partner is an obvious contrivance that might appeal to preadolescent (maybe even early adolescent) readers but it didn't work for me. Despite an ending that attempts to make her significant, Alia adds nothing but empty chatter to the story. (3) The method by which Undercurrents sets up the next book in the series is a bit too obvious.

Gripes notwithstanding, I liked Undercurrents. The story moves quickly, the actions scenes are well done, and the plot is satisfying if unspectacular. Hardcore fans of military science fiction will almost certainly enjoy it, while fans of action-oriented sf will likely find it a pleasant enough read.

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