SPACE STORY

In Marplot’s YA SF novel, the fate of the universe hinges on three survivors of spaceships fleeing a doomed planet Earth: the brilliant but power-mad scientist, his neglected son, and a spiritual teenage girl.

This mock-epic version of big-idea SF begins with repeated pronouncements by the supersmart, arrogant, and ultimately megalomaniacal Professor Lully that the planet Earth is “kaput”: “Systems and countries were failing, humanity was flailing, wars were raging, economies were sagging, nerves were fraying, religions were imploding.” His solution is to launch 360 escape pods, filled with the planet’s “elite,” into a cosmos in which Professor Lully’s unmanned Selflicator probes have supposedly already terraformed planets in preparation for colonization by the survivors of mankind. Lully has his own secret agenda and lifts off in an armed warship called the Nyx. His bright, 15-year-old son, Bobby, flies into space in a separate craft and is soon intercepted by a trio of aliens, including a talking dog called Barky. It’s soon revealed that the fast-reproducing Selflicators have created their own sentient robot civilization in defiance of Professor Lully’s strict programming. Declaring themselves superior to humanity, the Selflicators, who’ve renamed themselves “Deepoms,” are on a campaign of conquest that’s only tentatively held in check by a truce with more powerful aliens. A third party in the drama is teenage girl Kay, Bobby’s childhood friend, who escaped Earth in a spaceship built by her scientist brother. Her New Age–style philosophies end up having profound effects on the robots and artificial intelligences who encounter her. As war looms between aliens, robots, and the Nyx, vestigial memories of Bobby in the Selflicators cause them to worship the boy as “The Bobby,” or “The Los”—a godlike figure whose key power, it seems, is thinking up new and interesting names for things.

Marplot presents readers with a work that unusually combines Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s mad science withTeletubbies’ simplified descriptions and dialogue, baby-talk names (such as that of a nonverbal robot called Beepbeep), and childlike action. Yet, time and again, the author manages to throw in loftier themes of entropy, astrophysics, existential angst, machine intelligence, and even first-date jitters. As a result, this is a book that exhibits more intelligence behind all of its props and effects than a cantina-ful of Star Wars sagas. The material may be something of an acquired taste, even for the younger readers for whom it is intended, but the author’s eccentric, heightened prose style is sure to raise regular smiles: “The usually dutiful, reliable morning sun shot only a single ray of orange, as if tiredly blinking its giant eye, then hiding again behind a thick belt of cloud, understandably not wanting to see the Earth’s troubles, wanting to skip this one morning, shine somewhere else, and look the other way until tomorrow.” Whatever’s up next in the mixed-up files of Marplot will certainly be worth further analysis.

A fine genre spoof and tribute that provides wild outer-space adventure in calculatingly twee prose.