A foreword by Marianne Dyson explains the concept of a flight in constant motion between Mars and Earth, using the masses of the planets to boost the passage of a space vessel big enough to sustain a crew for months. Arriving at a planet, the crew could take a shuttle ride down and swap with a crew coming up while the vessel continued its motion. The scheme was proposed by astronaut Buzz Aldrin.
In THE LAST DANCE, Inspector General Park Yerim who is a Korean woman working for the System Initiative, arrives to investigate Captain Nicolau Aames, currently confined to quarters for alleged mutiny aboard the Earth-Mars vessel Aldrin. The story is then taken up by interviews – all of which are recorded though they are mostly titled ‘off the record’ for no reason – with various personnel, such as the ship’s doctor, security chief, engineer. All of them state that Aames is a hard taskmaster and can be abrasive but is good to work for as he keeps his crew alive. Through their backstories we see the reality of these assertions. That hard landing on Mars, the sulky billionaire’s kid who turned into a cross-educated asset, surviving a faulty ship’s control computer which (like HAL) has turned paranoid, resolving an allegation of murder while mountaineering on the Red Planet.
I enjoy hard SF stories and absorbed the orbital information but found some of the human aspects harder to swallow. Are highly trained people aboard a mission to Mars so juvenile that they throw punches in the bar? Do lengthy meandering stories about ‘how I met my husband’ have any place in the investigation? Given that the space travellers are from all over the planet, why does Aames say the only way to address a superior officer is with ‘sir yes sir’ which I’m not aware is used anywhere outside the US Forces? Why would a crew member have to list body parts put into the waste decomposer as of human origin – on Mars? Who else’s would they be? And as we are told that spider silk cable degrades all on its own in storage so that an inspection rejects three out of twenty coils, why does a highly trained mountaineering expedition team in a later segment of the tale check the integrity of everything except the spider silk cables?
Some of my queries were answered by the realisation that, like Ray Bradbury, Martin L. Shoemaker has compiled several short stories, undoubtedly written over a period, into a novel length format. The investigation is a wraparound way of presenting them with suspense. Star Trek’s pilot episode dealt with Captain April, similarly charged with mutiny, so this is a traditional path for militaristic SF. THE LAST DANCE contains many perturbing occurrences and asks who we can really trust when the going gets tough. I like that we see a film journalist travelling to make documentaries on the Red Planet. Every reader will pick his or her best incidents, but for sure, fans of Andy Weir’s The Martian will feel at home. Martin L. Shoemaker has previously had stories featured in anthologies like Blue Collar Space and released a novel called Today I Am Carey. If you like hard SF but haven’t made his acquaintance, it’s time you did.
At the heart of a mystery unfolding in space, the opposing forces make a treacherous journey between Earth and Mars.
In space, mutiny means death—that’s why Inspector General Park Yerim is taking her investigation so seriously. The alleged mutineer is Captain Nicolau Aames, whose command of the massive Earth-Mars vessel Aldrin has come under fire. The vast System Initiative says he disobeyed orders, but his crew swears he’s in the right.
En route to Mars, Park gathers testimony from the Aldrin’s diverse crew, painting a complex picture of Aames’s character: his heroism, his failures, even his personal passions. As the investigation unfolds, Park finds herself in the thrall of powerful interests, each pushing and pulling her in a fiery cosmic dance.
Corruption, conflicting loyalties, and clashing accounts make it nearly impossible to see the truth in fifty million miles of darkness, and Park faces danger from every direction. All eyes are on her: one way or another, her findings will have astronomical implications for the Aldrin and the future of space travel.
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