Jay Caselberg

Just as this series isn’t really about solving crimes, it also isn’t really about alien contact though that’s been a theme in all but the first book.

Yes, we have the aliens who built the City of Trees visited by Jack Stein and Billie in Metal Sky and actually encountered by Stein and McReedy in The Star Tablet. And Stein continues to be in contact with them in his dreams, and they get a name: the Silvers.

And they get an enemy: the alien Blacks.

And the nefarious Outreach Corporation, show more the villain of the series, has kidnapped Stein and taken him back to Locality. They want to wring the information out of him on how to contact the aliens and get their star drive. And, if the Silvers seem a little low-tech, well the Blacks might have something of use however malevolent the Silvers claim they are.

There will be escapes and recaptures, a bringing together of several of the threads from earlier books, the hacking of Locality’s systems, and psychic transformations.

But the threat suggested by the Blacks is not combatted head on. That combat doesn’t even start in the series. It’s just a gloss, a placeholder, for the theme of loneliness and isolation.

Once again, the series’ main interest is in the relationship between Billie and Jack. It was once something like parent and child.

But that was before the physical effects of star travel in the preceding book. Jack Stein has physically regressed in age by ten years. The opposite has happened to Billie. Now that they are much closer in apparent age, mutual sexual attraction is present. Typically for Caselberg, none of this is quite explicit. Jack and Billie not only don’t voice it to each other. They avoid voicing it to themselves. Undertones of jealousy on the part of Billie and Jack when they see the other with others, has shown up before in this series, but it’s stronger here.

Here McReedy develops an eye for Billie, and Jack again meets Alice, a librarian he met in Wyrmhole, but, in typical Jack fashion, never maintained contact with. The McReedy-Billie relationship has an element of danger since, unbeknownst to her, he sold Jack out to Outreach.

Caselberg resolves the issues of these four in a plausible and mostly satisfactory way that again gets to our theme of social isolation and its corollary of having no responsibility for anyone else.

The Family that Billie used to belong to in her younger days in Locality is a dark, ambiguous variation on these themes. Essentially, as we’re told in The Sky Tablet, the Family was a child prostitution and criminal hacker ring run by the weirdly mature acting kid Daman – another victim of space travel altering apparent age. Sure, it kept street kids like Billie alive, but she doesn’t want to think about some of the things that involved.

And then there is another community that starts to emerge as a side effect of the war Jack and company carries out against Outreach

It’s a mostly satisfying conclusion to the series – just so long as you realize that aliens are just a token concern of these books.

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It’s been two years since the events of Wyrmhole. Jack Stein and Billie, now 14 years old, have moved from the corrupt city of Locality to the better upkept and less corrupt town of Yorkstone. Billie has been thriving there away from the scene of her days as a sexually exploited child. She is now freer to follow her various educational impulses. Stein, however, remains some rudderless in his life, and work isn’t as plentiful at Yorkstone.

But work shows up with the femme fatale Bridget show more Farrell who wants Stein to find the Maltese Falcon a valuable artifact stolen from her.

As it progresses, this series has less and less interest in being a science fiction private eye story. Caselberg really does use the plot of the classic film The Maltese Falcon, right down to very similar scenes and dialogue (though we don’t seem to have the equivalent of the movie’s Joel Cairo).

Also, the metal tablet Stein is hired to get is tied to alien ruins on the planet Mandala. It’s typical of their characters that Billie is excited by the traces of aliens being discovered while Jack barely remembers the news story. Taking advantage of the newer and faster travel between stars made possible by the events of the last novel, Billie and Stein even visit Mandala.

But the book’s main point of interest is the ambiguity and tension in the relationship between Billie and Stein as skillfully conveyed in dialogue and Stein’s insistent resolution not to think about the matter. While we start with Billie sort of being the organized, motivated parent to Stein’s lack of direction from the previous novel, it goes to other areas here.

At times, Stein seems a parent to moody teenager Billie, and, at other times, their dialogue and interactions seem like a married couple or potentially romantic couple though there is no sex of any kind in the novel. That ambiguity persists through the book and, of course, makes the reader rather uncomfortable given Billie’s past and their age differences not to mention that they do have a weird sexual link from the previous novel.

And it’s the interplay between Billie and Stein throughout the series that gives it its main interest and develops the series' theme of isolation. show less

There’s a lot of classic hard-boiled detective story elements here.

Jack Stein will get beat up multiple times, be jailed by the police, and encounter a beautiful, seductive woman with her own agenda. Stein’s an ex-soldier and member of military intelligence. In those days, he was known as “Witchy Stein” because of his luck in avoiding ambushes and traps.

Eventually, he discovered he had psychic powers. He solves cases using clues provided in dream visions – often facilitated by a show more device that induces sleep or by getting psychic impressions from objects and people he touches.

He seems to have left the military under a cloud. He calls it fleeing the military, but it’s not clear if he went AWOL or not. He ended up, via the coincidences that guide his life, in Locality as a private investigator.

Locality is a quasi-living, snake-like city that crawls across the surface of a planet, digesting raw materials and building its structures which can even be programmed to reconfigure the layout of walls and furniture. The rich live at Locality’s head, the New. The poor and outcast live in the Old, the city’s tail, where the systems are starting to decay and die before failing altogether. Advertising drones and displays plague those who aren’t rich.

Stein has gone to seed both professionally and morally, become too dependent on his psychic powers and coincidence to solve his cases. He forgets things and doesn’t make obvious connections. He takes too many stimulants, dresses sloppily and doesn’t shave regularly. At novel’s end, he becomes uncomfortably aware of how far he’s fallen.

He’s hired by Warburg of the Outreach megacorporation to investigate the disappearance of some miners at one of their projects on a distant world. In Outreach’s office is Gleeson, a mid-level bureaucrat who tells Stein he’s not being told the truth. Gleeson hires Stein too because one of the vanished miners is his boyfriend, Ronschke. The latter gave Gleeson a handipad Ronschke left him.

Stein runs into a sleazy ex-associate of his, Pinpin Dan. Stein doesn’t want to think about the sort of things he suspects Dan gets up to, but he goes to him for help in unlocking the handipad. There he runs into a fifteen-year-old, waifish girl named Wilhemnia, who helps her “Uncle Pinpin” with his “work”. After returning a short time later, he finds Pinpin dead and Wilhemnia, aka Billie, cowering in a closet. She reports that a man and woman visited Pinpin.

Fearing for Billie’s safety, he takes and the handipad back to his apartment, hoping to find Billie’s family and turn her over to them. But she says she won’t talk about her family or her past.

When he’s sleeping, Billie crawls into Stein’s bed and leaves no doubt as to what part of her “work” with Uncle Pinpin involved. Stein puts an immediate stop to that when he wakes up. He finds himself reluctantly accepting responsibility for Billie and goes looking for her when she disappears.

It turns out Billie’s is something of a computer genius. She also turns out to be something like the adult in her relationship with Stein even though she turns out to be not 15 but 12. She points out obvious things, helps him solve problems.

And we’re off on a crime story that involves mystical texts and alchemy, a beautiful librarian, and a trip to the Old and its demimonde that Billie came from.

It’s a testament to Caselberg’s skill that I liked this story even though it has three elements that usually annoy me: a kid computer genius, sexual abuse, and a kid taking care of a damaged adult.

That bed scene is the only sexually explicit scene in the book. We don’t wallow in the details of Billie’s past. It’s kept vague, but it’s clear enough in its degradation. Billie may be a computer genius, but it’s more of a game to get data and connect it, not understand the “science” stuff she uncovers. Stein isn’t a dolt, just a man who has let himself decay, and Billie can be annoying in an unhumorous way.

Each book of the series is quite different in plot, but the relationship between Billie and Stein is at its core and carries the series with its interesting permutations.

This book, though, is self-contained and doesn’t suggest at all where this series eventually goes. This one, at least, works purely on the basis of a mystery too. show less

Private eye Jack Stein doesn’t even have a client in this one.

About two years ago, Billie, the girl Stein rescued from her life of child prostitution and criminal hacking, left to pursue her hunger for knowledge and fascination with xenoarchaeology at the University of Utrecht. She studied with Dr. Hervé Antille whom she met when she and Stein visited Mandala and the alien ruins there, the City of Trees, in the preceding novel Metal Sky.

Stein seems to be satisfied that Antille’s show more interest in Billie isn’t a perverted one, but he hasn’t heard from Billie for a while, and the psychic investigator has a premonition something is wrong. Traveling to Balance City on Utrecht, Stein finds that Billie and Antille have disappeared. Balance City turns out to be an authoritarian state that immediately is displeased with Stein showing up without notice, and he’s put under surveillance and even gets hauled into a meeting with the local mobster. He has ties to the Sons of Utrecht, a group seeking political power and vigorously proclaiming a platform of human supremacy even though no one has actually met the aliens who built the City of Trees.

And finding those aliens, using the original alien artifact that drew so much interest in Metal Sky, is what Antille and Billie have been up to. They commissioned a starship to look for the alien home world.

To follow them, “Lucky Stein” employs Danny Boy “Dog” McReedy, an old service buddy he just, in the usual manner with Stein, happened to run into in a bar. McReedy is a shady and evasive character. But Stein decides to trust him since he did save Stein’s life twice back in their military days, and he needs McReedy’s advanced ship.

They do make it to the alien world and even meet the aliens. Not that it does them any good. The aliens, giant, lumbering tree-like creatures, ignore them and can only communicate with Stein via his dreams. To do that, they use various characters we’ve met in the previous books.

Again, the relationship between Billie and Stein is at the core of the book. Since she left, Stein has been adrift. Not only is he used to Billie organizing things for him, but he contemplates how cut off he is from society with no friends, no contact with ex-veterans before he met McReedy. Indeed, his psychic visions are his main interaction with anything resembling other humans.

On Utrecht, he’s reminded by an academic that Billie is no longer the girl he remembered but a talented sixteen-year-old woman.

And, in their travels to seek the aliens, the relationship between Stein and Billie will undergo a radical physical transformation that will bring new complications.

Unlike previous books in the series, this one does not end with the two on the cusp of a new life by simply moving to a new place. Here they are both in danger at novel’s end.

When the book is in Balance City, it’s interesting, but, since psychic visions and alien contact are not among my favorite science fiction themes, the alien world section dragged a bit for me. But the cliffhanger conclusion will definitely interest you in reading the final novel. show less