A HERO

A cerebral space opera questions the meaning of heroism.

Ace Bedlam is a hero. His father, Smolder Bedlam, was the greatest hero of all in the war between Good and Evil, but since he was killed in an ambush on Saturn—taking many sinister soldiers down with him—Ace has done his best to fill his father’s shoes. Ace currently finds himself on a mission to the planet Evil, accompanied only by two ornery maintenance bots, a pet beaver, and a not-always-helpful artificial intelligence system named Anne. When he gets an invitation to visit the Institution of Evil on the planet’s surface, he seizes the opportunity to bring his enemies down from the inside. Ace is disappointed when the institution—a clean, white tower surrounded by gardens—doesn’t look as Evil as he expected. There, he meets a girl named Desde and a man called Andrew, who also do not seem very monstrous at first blush. They attempt to convince Ace that the world is more complex than Good and Evil, and though the confused protagonist soon escapes, their words linger in his mind. When he finds himself on a mission accompanied by several figures of indeterminate allegiance, he is forced to consider whether the stories he’s heard his whole life about Good and Evil might not be true. In this sequel, DeLauder’s prose has an effortless simplicity to it, painting the galaxy with the soft brush strokes of a fairy tale: “Nestled in the great wide emptiness of space, an ever-so-tiny spherical space station moved through the darkness between tumbling asteroids like a disconnected carriage wheel bouncing across the wasteland.” The novel is reminiscent of the interstellar fables of Italo Calvino and Stanislaw Lem. The rich, intriguing world does not do much to hide DeLauder’s thematic intentions, and yet the story never feels didactic. Fans of hard SF may be underwhelmed by Ace’s adventures, and it’s unclear precisely how this book fits into the author’s series given its self-contained story. Even so, DeLauder offers a delightful and witty flight of fancy

An entrancing and philosophical SF adventure.