Review: Fast-paced
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 01 2, 2013
On the surface, Rosetta is a combo plate of science fiction, detective story, and political thriller--with a space cowboy as the main character. The cocky, independent Meade sounds like Han Solo with a Texas accent. His good friend and sidekick, Emeline, is a combination of wise, Old-West bartender and cyberpunk feminist. They make a charming, if unlikely, pair. Rosetta is fast paced, with plot twists and revelations that keep the reader as off-footed as the gravity fluctuations on the spaceship that transports Jim and Em to Rosetta.But underneath the excitement, Rosetta provides social commentary on issues ranging from economic exploitation to feminism to slavery; it addresses the moral complexities of staging an uprising and asks intriguing questions about the cost-benefit ratio of revolution. For the most part, Johnson handles these themes gently and thus avoids turning an exciting tale into a tedious socio-political treatise. In fact, these explorations give the book a depth and thoughtfulness found in the best science fiction.The action sequences (and there are plenty of them) are well done. In places Rosetta has a very cinematic feel. In one chase scene, a flying motorcycle (called a "flyber" in the story) slips in the open window of an office building, zips through hallways, down the stairwell, and back out the front door, leaving frightened office workers cowering amid a whirlwind of flying papers, and leaving readers chuckling--even in this high-tech future, office workers still shuffle paper.I was troubled by a few inconsistencies in characterization (a couple of the bad guys are in some places truly evil and in other places seem to have rather deep veins of decency) and a need for some backstory to explain how certain characters came by their esoteric knowledge and amazing skills. That did not stop me, however, from engaging with the characters and reading eagerly to find out how it all worked out. The book could have used some tighter copy-editing, but the occasional errors were not distracting, and the book was very nicely formatted, making it a pleasure to page through on a Kindle.