Williams, Walter Jon. Angel Station. Tor, 1989.
Angel Station is, perhaps, the most original of all Walter Jon Williams’ novels, and rereading it after many years impressed me anew. Evidently, Williams himself had a similar experience. When he first published it, he thought it was a mess, but he says that reformatting it for ebook publication, he was surprised at how well it worked. It is a far-future first-contact story with all the pop and sizzle the best cyberpunk. Its main characters, Ubu Roy and Beautiful Maria are sibling “shooters,” who have the gene- and drug-enhanced reflexes to navigate their FTL ships through artificially generated singularities. But, they are young, down on their luck, and haunted by the holographic ghost of Pasco, their dead father. He created them through gene-splicing. Ubu Roy, the ambitious “bossrider” of their ship, has four arms and catlike reflexes. Beautiful Maria, his sister and sexual partner, is a “subatomic witch” who, with the proper drugs, can perceive and manipulate the electromagnetic spectrum at a quantum level. Their lives become more complicated when they meet a hive-mind alien with problems of its own. The alien is itself a well-developed character, and there is some surprising thematic complexity incorporated in the novel’s structure. If you missed this one, I would put it on your list. ( )

The entire first act was a bit of a drag, but it picked up after that. Still, it's not one of Williams' best. The book is competently written, but the story is somewhat forgettable. There are a couple of completely screwed up pages, but luckily my copy came with an errata page. Hope yours did, too. ( )

ZB13