The Dark Colony
Richard Penn
327 pages
published in 2014

James Nicoll is a longtime science fan active on Usenet and Livejournal, who has been working as an internal reviewer for various publishers. As that work started to dry up earlier this year, he started doing sponsored reviews, where people (but not authors) can buy reviews of books they're interested in, suspect James would like, or at least would have an enjoyable reaction to. I've known James for a long time and he's one of the people I absolutely trust their taste in books of, so I pay attention when he says something he's worth reading. Which is exactly what he did with Richard Penn's The Dark Colony and since it was cheap on *m*z*n, I bought it.

Now there was a risk with this. At times James' fondness for exactly the kind of setting The Dark Colony provides -- near future, the real Solar System, no magical rocket propulsion to let people pootle around it in hours or even days, no cheating -- can blind him to some of the other qualities (or lack thereof) of a book. Fortunately however, in this case, the book's appeal exists beyond its setting. Basically, this is a police procedural: it starts with the discovery of a body floating around in the the giant free fall hangar of Terpsichore Station. What's remarkable is that it's the body of a stranger to the Terpsichore colony, which only has a few hundred people living in the station and the asteroid itself. It's up to constable Lisa Johansen to find out where the stranger comes from and in the process she finds herself unravelling a huge conspiracy in the heart of her community and beyond. Yes, this is not just a police procedural, it's a gloomy Scandinavian one...

Well, not quite. While there is a conspiracy and it does cover awful crimes, the authorities are eager to stamp it out, not cover it up, they're just hindered by the huge distances in the Asteroid Belt. Terpsichore is weeks or even months away from other colonies and while nominally part of a larger government, basically can only count on advice and moral support through video link. But despite these limitations, the support from the Belt Federations police on Phobos is invaluable if only available at the speed of light. They cannot provide immediate support, but they do have greater analytical resources available to look at and evaluate the evidence Lisa finds as she combs out the Hold after the corpse had been discovered.

And the most surprising piece of evidence is another stranger, a young girl who turns out to be Daisy, the sister of Tommy, the murder victim, who had died smuggling her to freedom. Her story reveals a dark colony, a hidden colony in reach of Terpsichore whose existence was completely unsuspected until the two refugees turned up. Of course, as we all know, hiding in space is difficult and stealth impossible but there are ways of making you less visible, especially if nobody is looking for you and you do know who you need to hide from. However, this hidden colony, especially since it got supplied through Terpsichore, still needs accomplishes. And it's this where Phobos comes into its own, as they quite quickly unravel the conspiracy within Terpsichore Station to hide these contacts.

In the process it's established that the hidden colony is more than just an unregistered colony, but one in which a group of criminals hold captive a group of women in sexual slavery; Daisy herself was getting old enough that she was bound to come to the attention of her masters sooner than later, which is why her brother smuggled her out. Their mother is still held captive.

Once the conspiracy inside Terpsichore itself is rolled up, Lisa, freshly promoted to sergeant, is charged to lead a rescue expedition to the hidden colony, with only a rough idea on which one of the three neighbouring asteroids of the "Local Group" they're settled. The second half of the story is about making the preparations for this expedition and how Lisa and her crew manage to make the trip and rescue everybody, in the process setting up things for the sequel.

The Dark Colony is Richard Penn's first, self published novel. As his autobiography makes clear, he's a retired sofware engineer turned writer, not a "professional" writer. It's somewhat noticable in his prose, which is a bit awkward, especially at first, not quite naturalistic dialogue, a slight tendency to as you know Bobism, which largely disappears by the end of the novel. Not bad or atrocious writing, but workmanlike.

What I like, apart from the interesting, realistic setting and the plot itself, is the politics of the story. James noted that the policing reminded him of 19th century Canada: not the free for all of the American west, but embedded in at least a nominal national police system. That in itself is somewhat novel compared to the usual more libertarian sympathies of authors likely to use such a setting, but what also struck me were the very recognisable sexual politics.

To put it bluntly, quite a lot of science fiction has fairly hideous sexual politics, with manly men and fridged women and no sense that the future is much different from a sixties frat house. Not so here. It's not just Lisa and the other women who are revolted by the rape camps run by the dark colony, the men too are upset. In one scene, as they infiltrate the colony with remote controlled drones to find evidence of the crimes committed and Lisa basically hands out trigger warnings to her crew. It's a breath of fresh air to see the matter of factness with which modern, sane notions of consent and the existence of queer people are promulgated into the future. The same also goes for the way in which Penn handles the rapes and other sexual harassment, all off screen without tittilation.

Really, the only thing that actually bothered me about this book was the awkward use of Dutch cursing in one scene, when Lisa made contact with the Dutch mother of Tommy and Daisy. Nobody but Dutch rappers use "neuken" as a curse; we say fuck or kut, shit instead of strong and it's verdomde, not verdoemde klootzakken, etc. etc. But nothing is as hard as to do write realistic cursing in a foreign language so I'll forgive this.

The Dark Colony and its sequels are available from the author's website, less than four bucks on Amazon, so try it, you might like it.