Sly Mongoose by Tobias S. Buckell

September 10, 2008
I finished reading Tobias S. Buckell's third novel, SLY MONGOOSE yesterday. Toby's a friend of mine so this review is undoubtedly biased, but I enjoyed the book a lot. It's a standalone, although it takes place in the same universe as his earlier two, CRYSTAL RAIN and RAGAMUFFIN. You could read it without reading the other two, although I'm not sure I'd recommend it. Also, for you gamer/sf fans, Toby was recently tapped to write one of the video game HALO tie-in novels, which I believe is coming out soon.

SLY MONGOOSE takes place in a very distant future, about 50 years after the events of RAGAMUFFIN. Humans have gone out into the universe, which is a brutal, hostile place. For a very long time humans were pretty much slaves to The Benevolent Satrapy, a race of genius 100-foot-long slugs. The Satrapy have been overthrown and pretty much exterminated, humans are out doing their thing--squabbling with each other, mostly. The majority of humans that we encounter are distant ancestors of Caribbeans and Aztecs (or Mexicans, or something) who had more or less colonized New Anegada (more about them in the first two books).

SLY MONGOOSE takes place on the planet of Chilo, similar to Venus in that it's extremely hot with sulphuric clouds. Yet, way up in the atmosphere, cities float (true science, a large enough bubble of air would float in the higher levels of a Venus-like planet). Young men--young and small enough to fit in the suits--drop to the planet's hell-like surface to mine ore. In that respect we have Timas of Yatapek, a 14-year-old boy with culturally-induced bulimia (perhaps all bulimia is culturally-induced) who is a yocomotzin, one of those privileged to mine on the surface of Chilo, and incredibly dangerous job with 600 degree temperatures, sulphuric acid atmosphere and crushing pressures.

In drops Toby's recurring character, Pepper, a Ragamuffin and hero of the The Dread Council, hundreds of years old, genetically and nano-technology enhanced to be a super warrior. The ship he was on was taken over by The Swarm, a kind of bioweapon that turns people into zombie-like creatures with a collective mind controlled by, uh, maybe the League or maybe someone else.

Anyway, The Swarm also lands on Chilo, and one by one the floating cities begin to wink out as The Swarm takes them over. Pepper's job is to convince the remaining cities, specifically the Aeolians and the the city of Yatapek, to get organized and prepare for battle. It's a job that's sort of outside Pepper's comfort zone, requiring him to be a manipulative diplomat more than a warrior (don't worry, he kicks ass enough). Yatapek is inhabited by descendants of the Azteca from Nanegada and they are poor and technologically limited. The Aeolians have a sort of collective mind via technology (probably the purest form of democracy) and technology, although they are constrained by their floating cities as well.

SLY MONGOOSE is, more than anything, a fast-moving action novel with lots of battles and airships and stuff like that. On the thought-provoking side, it's got a lot to say about politics (not much of it positive) and responsibility. Perhaps even more so, and I'm starting to see this is a theme in Toby's works, there is a lot to be noted here about poverty in a rich world and that  technology can fail, particularly for poor people. Buckell does a wonderful job of creating a universe and world you can see, taste, hear, smell and feel. His internal politics are good, but I sometimes find the external big-picture politics confusing (like The League). In a very un-Star Trek way, the universe has serious limitations on travel and exploration and living on the basis of economics--anti-matter fuel for spaceships is expensive, made even more so by the destruction of most of the anti-matter factories by the Satrapy as they retreated from the Raga. On Chilo and Yatapek, they have little money to buy technology and barter for what they can get, but as time passes they struggle just to keep the protective groundsuits working that are needed to work on the surface of the planet.

Altogether, highly recommended for SF fans.

Cheers,

Mark Terry