Russ Allbery: Review: Collision Course

Review: Collision Course, by Michelle Diener

Collision Course is the sixth novel in the Class 5 science fiction
series and the first that doesn’t use the Dark X naming convention.
There are lots of spoilers in this story for the earlier books, but you
don’t have to remember all the details of previous events. Like the
novella, Dark Ambitions, this novel
returns to Rose, Sazo, and Dav instead of introducing another Earth woman
and Class 5 ship.

In Dark Class, Ellie discovered an
interesting artifact of a previously-unknown space-faring civilization.
Rose, Sazo, and Dav are on their way to make first contact when, during a
routine shuttle flight between the Class 5 and Dav’s Grih military ship,
Rose is abducted. The aliens they came to contact have an aggressive,
leverage-based negotiating strategy. They’re also in the middle of a
complicated war with more sides than are readily apparent.

What I liked most about Dark Horse, the
first book of this series and our introduction to Rose, was the revealed
ethical system and a tense plot that hinged primarily on establishing
mutual trust when there were excellent reasons for the characters to not
trust each other. As the series has continued, I think the plots have
become more complicated but the ethical dilemmas and revealing moments of
culture shock have become less common. That is certainly true of
Collision Course; this is science fiction as thriller, with a
complex factional conflict, a lot of events, more plot reversals than the
earlier books, but also less ethics and philosophy.

I’m not sure if this is a complaint. I kind of miss the ethics and
philosophy, but Diener also hasn’t had much new to say for the past few
books. The plot of Collision Course is quite satisfyingly twisty
for a popcorn-style science fiction series. I was kept guessing about the
merits of some of the factions quite late into the book, although
admittedly I was in the mood for light entertainment and was not trying
too hard to figure out where the book was going. I did read nearly the
entire book in one sitting and stayed up until 2am to finish it, which is
a solid indication that something Diener was doing worked.

I do have quibbles, though. One is that the ending is a bit unsatisfying.
Like Sazo, I was getting quite annoyed at the people capturing (and
recapturing) Rose and would have enjoyed somewhat more decisive
consequences. Also, and here I have to be vague to avoid spoilers, I was
expecting a bit more of a redemption arc for one of the players in the
multi-sided conflict. The ending I did get was believable but rather sad,
and I wish Diener had either chosen a different outcome (this is light
happily-ever-after science fiction, after all) or wrestled more directly
with the implications. There were a bit too many “wait, one more thing”
ending reversals and not quite enough emotional payoff for me.

The other quibble is that Collision Course was a bit too damsel in
distress for this series. Rose is pregnant, which Diener uses throughout
the book as a way to raise the stakes of the plot and also make Rose more
annoyed but also less capable than she was in her earlier novel. Both Sazo
and Dav are in full heroic rescue mode, and while Diener still ensures
Rose is primarily responsible for her own fate, there is some “military
men attempt to protect the vulnerable woman” here. One of the things I
like about this series is that it does not use that plot, so while the
balance between Rose rescuing herself and other people rescuing her is
still tilted towards Rose, I would have liked this book more if Rose were
in firmer control of events.

I will mostly ignore the fact that a human and a Grih sexually reproducing
makes little to no biological sense, since Star Trek did similar
things routinely and it’s an established genre trope. But I admit that it
still annoys me a bit that the alien hunk is essentially human except that
he’s obsessed with Rose’s singing and has pointy ears. Diener cares about
Rose’s pregnancy a lot more than I did, which added to my mild grumpiness
at how often it came up.

Overall, this was fine. I prefer a bit more of a protagonist discovering
how powerful she is by making ingenious use of the ethical dilemmas her
captors have trapped themselves in, and a bit less of Rose untangling a
complicated political situation by getting abducted by every player
serially, but it still kept the pages turning. Any book that is
sufficiently engrossing for me to read straight through is working at some
level. Collision Course was highly readable, undemanding, and
distracting, which is what I was looking for when I read it. I would put
it about middle of pack in the series. If Rose’s pregnancy is more
interesting to you than it was to me, that might push it a bit higher.

If you have gotten this far in the series, you will probably enjoy this,
although it does feel like Diener is running out of new things to say
about this universe. That’s unfortunate given the number of threads about
AI sentience and rights that could still be followed, but I think tracing
them properly would require more philosophical meat than Diener intends
for these books. Which is why the next book I grabbed was a Culture novel.

Currently this is the final book in the Class 5 series, but there is no
inherent reason why Diener couldn’t write more of them.

Rating: 7 out of 10