Alexander Jablokov
Deepdrive (1998)
Reviewed: 2000-02-12

Although Jablokov already has several books to his credit, this was the first time I had read anything by him. The unknown turned out to be a pleasant surprise.

Deepdrive is a space opera set in the solar system. Several centuries in the future, there are human settlements on the inner planets, and interplanetary space sports many habitats, partly extended from asteroids, partly engineered from scratch. The solar system is teeming with new life. A multitude of alien species has appeared and colonized their respective niches, sometimes in close cooperation with humans, sometimes completely ignoring us, and usually somewhere in between.

Soph is a woman beyond her youth. Trying to escape the pains of her past, she has joined a mercenary outfit that is on an ill-prepared mission to extract a mysterious alien from confinement on terraformed Venus. Subsequently to complete failure, Soph finds herself involved with various other burned-out characters, scarred from unlucky pasts. Their personal histories propel them along tracks that keep meeting, and what started out as disjointed pieces fits well together in the end.

Deepdrive is a romp through a weird and wondrous solar system. Not being a party to the secret of the "deepdrive" of the title, the enigmatic FTL device to cross the distances between the stars, humanity isn't a player the other galactic species content with. It is a strange future, described in extraordinarily vivid writing, full of incomprehensible aliens, partially intelligent machinery like Soph's semiautonomous luggage, bioengineered environments, and human denizens hardly less bizarre than the aliens, a background somewhat reminiscent of that in Christopher Evans's Mortal Remains.

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