Mackey Chandler

Chandler, Mackey. Family Law. Family Law No. 1. Kindle, 2011.
Dreadful young adult space opera is in no short supply, but reasonably well-plotted young adult space opera with characters that don’t make an older reader like me gag is hard to find. I am happy to report that Mackey Chandler’s Family Law was one that I could read with pleasure. Lee, a child of about 12 or 13 (time dilation effects make it hard to say which), has grown up on a starship looking for undiscovered planets with show more exploitable resources. When her parents are killed by predators on a marketable planet, named Providence because it would sell better than Purgatory, she is adopted by the only surviving member of the crew, the Derf Gordon, the six-legged, four-armed, furry ship’s captain. She is adaptable and, after some initial awkwardness on both sides, gets along reasonably well with his mountain clan. But things go badly amiss when they become tangled with a Family Court on Earth. The conflict could start an Interstellar war. Gordon and Lee are likeable characters who are not cardboard cutouts, and the story develops its themes adroitly. It is a series I hope holds up. 3.5 stars. show less

Chandler, Mackey. Secrets in the Stars. Family Law No. 3. Kindle, 2016.
In this third installment of Mackey Chandler’s Family Law series, the Derf Gordon, the human Lee, and the rest of the multispecies small fleet continue to explore and develop new trading relationships. In their earlier explorations, most of the races they met were groups that did not present an overwhelming threat, but this time they must deal with the superior technology of the caterpillars and some others that even show more the caterpillars don’t want to mess with. The inventive alien tech continues to entertain, and Gordon is as gruff and lovable as ever. The series now runs to six volumes, but I miss the tight character focus of the first one. 3.5 stars. show less

Chandler, Mackey. Fair Trade: An Alien Invasion Story. Kindle, 2021.
In a recent blog, Nathan Lowell pointed out that easy independent publishing on Internet platforms has shown that there are substantial audiences for authors whose work would have a hard time finding an agent and would likely never be picked up by dead-tree publishers with editorial departments and advertising budgets. Mackey Chandler’s science fiction is a case in point. Before Fair Trade, he had already published 18 show more novels in two ongoing series. He is not a world-class writer, but he does tell entertaining stories set in future worlds that are more nuanced than one might expect. His stories might have found their way into pulp magazines or fanzines in the mid-twentieth century, but without the Internet there would be no place for them in a publishing world dominated by six companies and a decreasing number of brick-and-mortar bookstores. But I am happy to read them at a price that does not break my bank. In Fair Trade, a starship enters our near-future solar system with serious mechanical problems. They have only met two other space-faring races, neither of whom are friendly. When their exploratory drone is shot down, they don’t expect much better from humans. Earth’s many governments view them with suspicion but recognize the advantages they might gain if they could acquire some alien technology. Some of their technology is indeed superior to human stuff, but some of it isn’t. Duncan injects wry humor as we watch both sides misinterpret each other’s culture. Most Earth governments would like a monopoly on the aliens, but such secrets are hard to keep. The story develops around three alien-human encounters: one with a retired black-ops soldier in Alaska who provides them with some good security advice, another with a car dealer in Florida who protects them from a gator attack, and a third with an 80-year-old amateur astronomer who shares his discovery with amateur astronomer around the world. It is just the kind of story I would have been happy to read in a copy of Galaxy in my long-ago youth. 3.5 stars, and I look forward to the next volume. show less

Chandler, Mackey. The Long Voyage of the Little Fleet. Family Law No. 2. Kindle, 2014.
I am a fan of stories that speculate about the possibilities of interstellar commerce. I enjoyed the first volume of Mackey Chandler’s Family Law series in which Lee, the orphaned daughter of a planet exploring parents, is adopted by her alien crewmate, Gordon. Together they market their find on Gordon’s home world and wrestle with the bureaucracies of Earth. In The Long Voyage of the Little Fleet, show more Gordon and Lee launch an exploratory mission on a larger scale. There are aliens aplenty, both in their multispecies fleet and in the new sectors of the galaxy they explore. The main strength of the novel is following the characters as they work to establish trading relationships with species with whom it is very difficult to communicate. Will they like coffee or find it disgusting? All this is fun, but I think Chandler misses a bet by making Gordon rather than Lee the central character. 3.5 stars. show less