A JACK FOR ALL SEASONS

In Smith’s SF series installment, an interplanetary actor/singer/rogue faces warlike cephalopod aliens using faster-than-light technology.

This series relates the zesty, comedic, and rather torturously plotted capers of Jack Jones, a crewman aboard the starship Shakespeare. The crew poses as Earth’s cultural ambassadors, performing human music and classic plays for various alien species, but in reality, they’re spies/troubleshooters looking out for humankind’s interests. Jack and the Shakespeare team were slow to realize that their faster-than-light drives are part of a fiendish plot by their inventors, the octopuslike Quihiri. After an “upgrade” issued from the Quihiri homeworld, the drives begin to fail, leaving many alien civilizations suddenly helpless before xenophobic Quihiri armies. The opening plunks the reader right down in the middle of all this, and over the course of the book, Jack tries to unite with Earth’s forces and share intel to thwart the villains without being separated from his Shakespeare friends in the fog of combat. His new compatriots—including Max, a superintelligent talking dog—are less than open-minded about Jack’s occasional Quihiri allies and unconventional methods. Readers unfamiliar with this complicated series should know that Jack is a young clone of the lawless original Jack (“Old-Jack”), who languishes in jail; the clone inherited Old-Jack’s cover job and his ship-captain romantic partner, Gina. A semi-endearing facet of the material is that the new Jack is truly a lover, not a fighter, who tries to solve things with kisses rather than gunfire. Early on, Jack meets Jax Jones, who looks and acts exactly like him—which oddly isn’t fully addressed until the closing pages. There are numerous quotes from Shakespeare as well as a famous Star Wars line and Cats lyrics. The author is a physicist at the University of Colorado, and she ably uses her expertise to spike her fiction with quantum theory. In a brief afterword, she also acknowledges her debt to Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy cycle, which readers will notice—especially in the detail of improbability-powered star travel. Jack’s larkish antics may also captivate fans of Harry Harrison’s classic Bill the Galactic Hero series.

A frisky, if somewhat convoluted, SF satire with some Shakespearean knavery.