Resilient by Allen Stroud
(Flame Tree Press, 2022)
Reviewed by Dev Agarwal
My last review of a work by Allen Stroud ended with “And if you like Fearless, more is on its way as Stroud is currently at work on a sequel.” As promised, Stroud now delivers Resilient, second in his Fractal space opera adventure.
Fearless centred around life onboard the Search and Rescue spaceship Khidr. Its sequel pours kinetic energy into the opening, with a terrorist attack on Earth’s biggest power plant in Atacama, Chile. This is not just political violence, but an act of economic sabotage that imperils Earth’s population and those living off planet as well.
The sequel also ups the ante again by embroiling the whole solar system in a civil war between corporations and governments that have previously collaborated to colonise the sun’s planets.
Stroud navigates a suitably elaborate solar system by juggling the parallel storylines of multiple protagonists. New characters include Dr Emerson Drake who arrives to an emergency involving a shuttle at Phobos Station, near Mars. He expects to offer aid to injured miners only to be swept up in a plot involving the earlier attack at Atacama.
We return to the crew of the Khidr through Ensign April Johansson and Ellisa Shann’s storyline. Shann, we may recall, is well adapted to zero g life due to her physical disability (she has no legs), which is most definitely not a disability to her space-going career. Now transposed to the ship Gallowglass, and demoted from captain by her crewmates, Shann is faced with trying to return home or stay in proximity to the gravity anomaly that destroyed the remnants of the Khidr. Johansson adds the new perspective of a more junior crew member, trying to navigate the post-mutiny environment onboard Gallowglass.
Even more in extremis is Natalie Holder, subject to terrifying MK Ultra-like experiments in a prison lab. Initially trapped on Earth, Holder has her consciousness transmitted to Phobos in time to be swept up in the revolt that takes over the station.
These storylines are suitably dynamic to be exciting in the customary fast pace of much space opera. However, Stroud goes deeper into both the characters and the plotting, interconnecting his protagonists and expanding on the background of the first novel. The insurgents on Phobos are led by Rocher, who is the clone of the character who caused the mutiny on Shann’s Khidr. And Drake, also on Phobos, has a brother on the Khidr.
Stroud does not neglect his worldbuilding even as he moves us through a complex and visceral plot. Fearless and Resilient use the current role of the corporate sector in politics and space exploration to imagine colony worlds throughout the twenty first century. Stroud delivers the history of the next hundred years to the reader through expositional devices of news bulletins, political speeches and public service announcements. These explain the background that leads to the tense socio-political environment of 2118 AD.
The end product is a novel of espionage, drama, the immensity of outer space, the nature of inner space and human consciousness, the growth of AI and the role of faceless bureaucracies dominating fully realised characters. Stroud wheels between plot device, characters and settings to add colour and depth to his Space Opera. But he also sets the challenge to himself of moving through tones and subgenres. Resilient is a faux history of the colonisation of the solar system but it’s also a baroque tale of Space Opera, and it contains shards of horror (as a distinct genre in its own right) when we look at Natalie Holder’s experiences in mind control and sustained mental abuse. This is a particularly compelling aspect to the book and takes the reader into a realm of ethics and morality that are often neglected in plot driven spaceship SF.
Review from BSFA Review 18 - Download your copy here.