Helix – Eric Brown

This is a likeable book without being particularly good.

The story has a colony ship (humanity’s last hope following environmental disaster on Earth) crash landing on a vast big-dumb-object, the titular helix of worlds, strung around a star. The small crew must set out to find a spot where the surviving colonists - still hibernatign - can thrive. On their journey they meet aliens both violent and benign across a variety of wild and unfamiliar environments. There’s something slightly old-fashioned about this set-up. One could almost imagine the basic outline being used for one of those Irwin Allenesque sci-fi shows (like The Time Tunnel or Lost in Space or, more recently, Quantum Leap or Sliders) where our heroes encounter a new planet every week which must be explored and overcome before, like The Littlest Hobo or Bill Bixby in The Hulk, they must move on in their apparently endless quest (which actually ends ingnominously about half way throught the third season when the studio pulls the plug and we never find out what happens) to the sound of a poignant piano theme. Interspersed with this is the story of Ehrin Tesla an airship designer of an alien species whose world is ruled by a rigid and cruel theocracy.

This is a novel that doesn’t bear great contemplation. It works much better if one takes it all in a rush (as the polished and smart writing encourages you to) than if one pauses too long over the parts. Brown himself seems to recognise this. The story rarely sits still to give the reader time to think or mull over the more implausible moments and Brown rather side-steps any question about how his big dumb object might have been built and maintained by placing it all in the province of the mysterious, ancient, transcendent builders.

But, while the story moves fast it is never wholly satisfying.

There are problems with the character arcs. The central human character, Hendry, an old space pilot who gets one surprising last chance to fly on the colonisation mission and spends most of the first hundred pages of the story fretting about his relationship with his daughter, but this relationship is torn up and thrown away suddenly and unsatisfactorily. That Hendry’s feelings for his daughter then seem to transfer to Kaluchek the younger woman who eventually becomes his love interest is, well, creepy. The relationship gets off on the wrong footing (for me) and never really convinces. There’s no obvious chemistry between the characters and the whole thing feels forced.

There are other things that are slightly creepy too. Making the only black character in the book, Friday Olembe, a hulking physical threat and presumed rapist for much of the book borders on the blatantly and unpleasantly stereotypical – that this threat is ultimately made disappear in a slightly disingenuous and unbelievable magic trick doesn’t make the way the character has been used feel any less exploitative.

And speaking of stereotypes… the cold and distant doctor Gina is a lesbian? What a surprise!

Nor, particularly, did I buy the hysterical flip-flopping of Ehrin’s girlfriend, Sereth. Her stubborn, stupid, refusal to face overwhelming facts left me without sympathy for her while her eventual rehabilitation seemed to have no logic behind it other than to give one of the novel’s central characters a happy ending. One might also argue that, while Ehrin and Sereth are furry aliens their relationship (him: brave explorer, rational scientist and business genius; her: screaming bimbo who almost gets everyone killed before realising her man was right all along) ought to have been left in the fifties.

I feel a little mean criticising Helix this harshly. I like an awful lot of the stuff that Eric Brown writes and I enjoyed this while I was reading it. And I’m not suggesting that he is consciously promoting these stereotypes - by the way he writes the characters of Friday and Gina it might even have been his intention to try and undermine them, but if this was his goal, the attempt is clumsy and he doesn’t succeed to the degree that I (and I hope he) would have liked.

Still, as the story rips along and there’s plenty of amazing stuff to gawk at along the way. Brown orchestrates the plots neatly enough and the whole thing rushes through any improbabilities to a very space opera finale in which mankind’s special role in the universe is confirmed.

There’s nothing here that’s going to shock readers with its originality but Helix is fun holiday reading. It’s widescreen sf that takes its prompts from some hard-sf classics but doesn’t bother getting bogged down in the technical stuff. This approach is likely to infuriate purists, but might well win Brown a wider audience with more casual sf reader. It’s also a novel that’s almost begging for a big screen, big budget adaptation.