THE REALITY RESCUE

In Pearce’s SF novel, a TV producer peddling his “reality” adventure show zooms into action (and possible high ratings) when robots rebel.

Pearce continues his semi-comical Green Charisma SF series in this installment. In the far future, spacefaring former journalist Ian MacIntyre produces the reality-TV holovid program Green Charisma, which chronicles the adventures of a hammy freelance adventurer called Captain Charisma (he’s actually a smart and fearless former military commando named Joe Drake). The show is set aboard the erstwhile smuggling vessel Blackthorn Beauty; Joe is backed up by the “Green” character, the dangerous but alluring reptilian alien Sanraya of the fearsome Vellaran race. Sanraya is also the divorced Ian’s passionate lover (readers are spared the biological details explaining how this works, but Ian has to wear protective gear to survive their sexual interludes). The team are independent-production underdogs; while trying to promote themselves at a television fan convention, the meet-and-greets are suddenly interrupted by terrorists, turning a reunion between Joe and his adoring relatives into a chaotic tragedy. Apparently, an artificial-intelligence / robotics uprising has occurred, originating with automata left behind on an abandoned Vellaran mining-colony moon. Now a “Chromium Confederation” of machines is determined to liberate all robot-kind and make war on organic sentient life. To this end, they have abducted Abby, Joe’s young niece, along with her chaperone-companion robot Baz. For mysterious reasons, Baz, an obsolete humanoid model with outdated military codebreaking functions, is of strategic value to the Confederation’s revolution. The situation is a ready-made plotline for the Green Charisma show to spearhead a rescue…and this time, the stakes are highly personal. Complicating the situation, two of Sanraya’s unfriendly brothers materialize to sabotage the mission in an effort to pry her out of show business and drag their errant sister back into the family fish-farm enterprise (and out of a scandalous cross-species love affair). Additionally, the misanthropic AI who operates the Blackthorn Beauty (personified as a hologram depicting a large, talking, flightless bird) has been behaving more disrespectfully than usual to the Green Charisma team. Is she a Chromium Confederation sympathizer, apt to lethally switch sides?

As in previous entries of the series, most of the opportunities to burlesque entertainment media and ratings-mad networks get shoved to the margins in favor of broad applications of SF action, which are handled at least partially with tongue-in-cheek humor. Despite a panoply of exotic alien species and environments, most everyone just talks and behaves like tough guys, bullies, and badasses, including the chief rebel robot, a gangsterlike gizmo called Ortho Lugnutz. There is some gravitas lent by the machine-menace factor of the Chromium Confederation, a keen bit of pop paranoia about exploited computers striking back; it still delivers a frisson in spite of the basic A-B plotting and sidelong smirks. It’s a notable satirical sting that the digital villains parrot left-wing 19th- and 20th-century sloganeering about the “proletariat” and such: “Lugnutz spewed Marxist dogma like a zealot from another time. Where the hell did an artificial intelligence pick up the lingo from a near-dead ideology?” The action is above par, with some exciting quasi-naval spaceship maneuvering and skirmishing in the void, helping boost this volume as the most entertaining installment in the series so far.

This knockabout SF series hits a high point.