Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
New York: Mulholland Books, 2014; $26.00 hc; 291 pages
It’s San Diego Comic Con in 2001, and Greg Rucka has all but accused me of buying the ARC of Critical Space that I’m holding via eBay. Off-balance and fighting against my stutter, I manage to explain that I got it from my godmother, who’s an assistant manager at Cody’s Books, and mumble something about admiring his novels and his comics work. Rucka’s anger subsides, and his gracious inscription includes the phrase, “This is a dark ride.”
It’s true. It’s dark as hell. I loved it.
The twin hallmarks of Greg Rucka’s work are an uncompromising, well-grounded depiction of violence and its consequences, and a deep compassion that can flare into rage. This is particularly evident in his novels, from the loathing of corporations lying about their products’ health risks that permeates Smoker to his brutal depiction of human trafficking in Walking Dead. Nobody writes about gunplay and tactics as well as Rucka. Of those who come close, very few have politics that could be described as humane while Rucka’s villains are tobacco companies, antiabortion terrorists, and plutocrats setting up false-flag attacks on American soil.
Bravo, direct sequel to Alpha (2012), is not science fiction. While Alpha takes place in an imaginary equivalent of Disneyland, its alternate history stops there. Both Alpha and Bravo are firmly embedded in the genre discourse of the thriller rather than sf. This is not to say that thrillers do not blur into sf and vice-versa—Harris’s Fatherland, Stephenson’s Zodiac, and nearly anything by Michael Crichton immediately spring to mind—but Alpha and Bravo essentially have no speculative elements even when compared to works like Greg Bear’s Quantico or Tobias Buckell’s Hurricane Fever.
What Alpha and Bravo have in common with sf are rigorous attention to detail, their use of exposition, and shifts between realism and hyper-realism. These commonalities are sufficient for their successes (and failures) to be understood using the critical lenses that we use for sf.
Alpha’s plot is a variation on Die Hard: a group of terrorists infiltrate a major American theme park (Wilsonville, a transparent stand-in for Disneyland), and a rock-jawed hero must stop them while also saving his family, who are being held hostage. But Rucka’s execution takes this formula and turns it inside out. Master Sergeant Jad Bell, Alpha’s protagonist, isn’t John McClane, able to take down a building full of terrorists single-handedly—while he leads a team of special forces operators, he (and they) are distinctly mortal. Jad’s daughter, Athena, is deaf but far from passive; both her handicap and her ability to read lips and body language are handled deftly and have an impact on the action. And instead of being a greed-driven caricature, the primary antagonist in Alpha, Gabriel Fuller, is depicted in a sympathetic light, especially once his girlfriend is taken hostage alongside Jad’s daughter and ex-wife. Rucka’s strengths are employed to their fullest in Alpha, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Other readers and critics have praised Bravo for not reprising Alpha’s narrative. Opening days after the events of Alpha, it traces the consequences of the failed terrorist attack as Jad and his team storm a villa in Uzbekistan to capture Vosil Tohir, the Uzbek middleman who set up the events of Alpha on behalf of a shadowy mastermind known only as the Architect. In capturing Tohir, they also capture Chief Warrant Officer Petra Nessuno, a deep cover operative spying on Tohir for another group in Special Operations Command.
Bravo extends Alpha’s themes of duplicity and dual identities beyond Nessuno to include Brock, the general in charge of her section of SOCOM—who helped orchestrate the plot against Wilsonville—and Jordan Webber-Hayden, the agent of the Architect with whom Brock is sexually involved (and who is obsessed with the man who groomed her to be his instrument). This plotline is less successful than Gabriel Fuller’s in Alpha because the folie à deux between Jordan and the Architect is problematic on several levels; a major plot point involving Jordan holding people hostage to ensure Tohir’s death doesn’t really work as written, given what all special operators would know about hostage situations.
As a thriller, Bravo keeps the reader’s attention from the first page to the last without flagging. Its well-choreographed action sequences are as brutal as those in Alpha, and the sequences involving Athena are just as solidly handled. But its problems are threefold. First, Bravo’s POV proliferation (there are six nonthrowaway POVs, compared to four in Alpha) is symptomatic of the book’s wavering focus. What begins as a race to uncover the identity of the Architect before he silences Tohir turns into a race to prevent a devastating second terrorist strike, which turns into the Architect bartering away the details of the terrorist strike and the identity of his financial backers in exchange for Jordan’s life and freedom. (His freedom, in turn, is ensured by the CIA, who intend to turn him and his network to their own ends.)
In the heat of reading, this all works fairly well, but once I was finished, I had the queasy feeling that the book I’d been promised and the book I’d just read were not the same book. Bravo is a book full of trailing threads; of motivations that are not quite grounded enough and shadowy masterminds taking on their opponents personally instead of through catspaws. The parallels between Nessuno and Jordan never quite cohere into anything more than what they are on the surface, and unlike the end of Alpha, it’s not at all clear what comes next.
There is also a shift in Bravo’s level of realism that occurs roughly halfway through the book, once Jordan and the Architect begin to take action personally, a shift that parallels the shift from the first half of Christopher Nolan’s 2012 film The Dark Knight Rises to the second. In the first half of Rises, the Gotham City Police Department uses cover, tactics, and muzzle discipline when engaging Bane’s minions. By the concluding brawl, they rush down the street as a screaming mob, all thought of tactical advantage eradicated in favor of naked catharsis.
While Bravo never descends to that level—Rucka knows better than that—the escalation that comes as the Architect becomes personally involved in saving Jordan pushes the book further and further from the grounded experience of Alpha where commanders and masterminds stayed far away from the killing. The second half of Bravo reads like the sequel to a book where Tohir’s impossible promise of a helicopter coming to save Gabriel from Wilsonville at the end of Alpha turned out to be true.
This probably reads as a harsher condemnation of Bravo than it’s meant to be. The trouble with Bravo is that Alpha was so brilliantly executed that anything short of its sequel firing on all cylinders—plot, characterization, action, realism—was going to come off as a disappointment. Bravo is a more ambitious book than Alpha in several regards; the depiction of Nessuno struggling with the aftermath of her infiltration is gripping, and Rucka never stoops to fridging* Jad’s relatives to motivate him (Hurricane Fever, I’m looking at you). While Alpha hits the mark, Bravo doesn’t, and close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.
Alec Austin lives in Los Angeles.
[*“Fridging” refers to the “Women in Refrigerators” story cliché identified by Gail Simone in 1999. It refers broadly to killing characters purely as a motivation for the (action) hero to have an excuse to unleash violence on the perpetrators. The eponym is a 1994 Green Lantern comic where the hero’s girlfriend, introduced only a few issues earlier, is found murdered and stuffed into a refrigerator. It’s a term of, unfortunately, wide applicability across a range of genres.—the eds.]
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