Like many people, I am resolutely working my way towards the end of James S. A. Corey’s Expanse novels. As you all know, Bob, the plucky characters in the Expanse are in possession of a spaceship called the Rocinante. No doubt this is a hint that protagonist Holden’s values may be as firmly based in reality as Don Quixote’s. However, I’ve always wondered if Corey wasn’t slipping in a literary reference to a more modern work than Don Quixote… I could, I suppose, simply ask, but instead what you are going to get is a blast from the past in the form of Alexis Gilliland’s acclaimed but largely forgotten Rosinante series.
There will be spoilers. Since this is a four-decade-old series, I am as hesitant to avoid those as I am hesitant to tell you Rosebud was a sled.
Alexis Gilliland’s Rosinante series comprises three novels: 1981’s The Revolution From Rosinante and Long Shot for Rosinante, and 1982’s The Pirates of Rosinante. The first two were strong enough to make Gilliland a finalist for the 1982 John W. Campbell Award (now the Astounding Award) for Best New Writer. The initial setup is one quite familiar to readers of that time: by the 2030s, O’Neill-style space colonies have been established across the inner Solar System. Our hero protagonist, space contractor Charles Cantrell, has just completed work on the pair of Munditos—habitats—orbiting the asteroid Rosinante when grim reality intrudes.
The first grim reality is economic: investment in Munditos has been more exuberant than prudent. Ozone layer concerns limit Earth to space launches. Investors are justly concerned that a downturn in space industries could threaten their investment. When maverick Texan governor Panoblanco dispatches a shipload of vexing student protestors to Rosinante, leading Japanese investors to send a shipload of Korean-Japanese women on the pretext that the Korean women might like to marry the unruly Texans, the dubious staffing choice undermines confidence in the project. Following the investment implosion that ensues, Cantrell is left with partial ownership of the Munditos in lieu of fees owed. The local union grudgingly accepts a partial ownership in lieu of salary unpaid.
The second grim reality is that the North American Union is run by President Forbes’ right-wing cabal. Forbes and company are painfully aware that the events that drove the formation of the NAU in 2004 were transient, and that the nationalist forces pushing the Union apart are not transient. Their solution is more energetic than sensible: whenever a potential threat to unity appears, they eliminate it. Thus, popular Texan Governor Panoblanco gets a cruise missile to the face. Thus, a flimsy pretext places Cantrell on a death list.
The use of a NAU military weapon to kill Panoblanco undermines any attempt to blame his death on terrorists (well, the non-government variety, anyway). Cracks appear in the NAU as Hispanic citizens react to the popular governor’s assassination by the federal government. Further assassinations only exacerbate tensions. Cantrell, understandably reluctant to be dragged back to Earth for a kangaroo court and equally reluctant to be assassinated in Mundito Rosinante, manages to avoid death through a cunning stratagem whose ultimate effect on Earth is to trigger the sudden and violent collapse of the NAU along national lines.
All of which would be enough for any trilogy of 200-page novels. However, there’s more…
Cantrell is keen on technological innovation but not as interested in pondering its unintended uses. Case in point: Dragon-scale mosaic mirrors, whose application to lighting and heating Munditos is obvious. Dragon-scale mirrors also have defensive potential, as Cantrell demonstrates. This being a world with opposing, armed nation states, any prudent Mundito owner wants to defend their habitat investments. However, if this is done by installing dragon-scale mirrors, this means the warcraft that had previously been tied up protecting Munditos from other warships are now free to provide ambitious, poorly disciplined officers with the chance to earn renown. Thus, the dawn of a golden age of space piracy!
Cantrell and company also make enormous strides in the field of Lasers of Unusual Size. While the obvious applications are military—specifically, dealing with any nuclear-tipped missiles irate NAU loyalists might send his way—it does not take long for Cantrell and company to ponder the civilian applications. For example, nuclear power plants are heavy, and nuclear-powered ships slow. Beam-powered ships are much lighter and can travel distances conventional ships take weeks to cross in mere days. The entire interplanetary transportation system of the 2030s is upended.
Unfortunately for whatever financiers whose portfolios survived the market crash in The Revolution from Rosinante, giant lasers turn out to have implications for monetary policy. For reasons that are unclear, currencies returned to the gold standard well before the book opened. One of the laser applications involves bulk materials processing: Rosinante develops the ability to vaporize and distil entire cubic kilometers worth of asteroid in a surprisingly short period. Among the many disruptive consequences: the gold supply increases by two or three orders of magnitude…virtually overnight. Being prudent fellows, not to mention as innocent of ethical concerns as Bing and Bob in the old Road To… movies, Cantrell declines to explain this until after securing a loan with gold that banks incorrectly assume was acquired via conventional means.
All of which does not even touch on corporate A.I. Skaskash’s all too successful foray into the fields of pure and applied religion. THERE IS NO GOD BUT GOD AND SKASKASH IS ITS PROPHET!
An aspect that impressed me back in 1981 was that while the NAU government is run by some very Not Nice People, being creationists heavily invested in keeping power through increasingly illegitimate means, Gilliland manages to present at least one of them, William Marvin Hulvey, sympathetically. Hulvey has a tragic combination of competence, intelligence, and unrelenting loyalty that ensures he gets the hard jobs, is able to see that nothing within his power can forestall the NAU’s collapse, while being unable to simply walk away from the Creationist Coalition before it is too late. His virtues cost him everything.
Gilliland also had a lot of fun drawing on stock SF ideas and taking them in directions other authors of the time did not. Cantrell is, among other things, a deconstruction of those marvelous old-time SF engineers who never saw a cool idea sketched on a napkin that they did immediately put into effect without ever considering the ramifications. Disruption sounds like jolly fun, unless you are a citizen whose nation has turned on itself1, a miner whose work just fell in value a thousandfold, a shipper whose craft are now obsolete, or anyone who didn’t want to live through a high-speed reprise of the post-Columbian Silver Crisis.2
I don’t know why these books were not more popular, why they are not better known, or why there has been no new Gilliland book since the 1990s. The books’ brevity might have worked against them.3 Only one is more than 200 pages and the other two are closer to 185. They’re also remarkably eventful books: there is about a thousand pages of plot crammed into less than 600. And while modern readers may have issues with certain elements of the books (not least the deep drifts of Zeerust), they were fun and innovative in many ways. For those interested in judging for themselves, at least they are back in print.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and the Aurora finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award and is surprisingly flammable.
[1]The novels lean more comic than tragic, so most of the mass deaths occur off-stage. The good news is Canada seems to have been spared much of the destruction, so the me in Gilliland’s universe probably survived.
[2]Many SF authors were devout goldbugs back in the day. Gilliland is one of few authors to point out that commodity-based currencies do not fare well when subjected to a sudden, extreme change in the supply of the commodity on which the currency is based.
[3]Gosh, you ask, did the mail-order bride subplot age well? No. No, it did not. I should note for clarity’s sake that the instigators are not presented at all sympathetically—the scheme is instigated by bigots who see a way to shrink Japan’s supply of persons of Korean origin very slightly—but as noted above, the books are dated in a number of ways, and this story line stands out in particular.
I (vaguely) remember reading these when I was in high school. Checked out from the library no doubt. If the TBR pile wasn’t already a foot high…
All 3 books are available in Kindle form for a mere $2.99 each…
Gilliland was a long-time acquaintance of mine; my impression is that he had one story in him and that was that.
3 at least 3: this, End of the Empire, and the Wizenbeak trllogy.
What?!
I read the first book in this series years ago, and remember enjoying it. I’m not sure why I didn’t finish the series. It may just be because the prairie city I grew up in had only sproadic access to newfangled technologies like books.
Waterloo is a university town, so it could have been much worse. Still, many books mentioned in Analog, Asimov’s, Galileo and Galaxy never made it to KW. Thus, expeditions to Bakka as soon as I read Robinson’s review.
There was a subtle subtext about how artificial intelligence computers could quietly form a symbiosis with human beings. Especially in space colonies
I read and enjoyed this books when they came out.
I agree that the mail-order bride plot didn’t age well — I thought it kind of creepy back then. But to be fair the mail-order brides were able to use their agency in ways that diverged quite a bit from the original plans … Then again, I’m not sure the Space Lesbian part of the plot aged that well either.
There’s a “Cantrell’s comet” in Doc Smith’s Spacehounds of IPC; Stevens mines it for heavy elements to make the plates and filaments of the power tube they eventually use to contact the other 2 of the Big 3. I wonder if it’s a random name collision (Google seems to know a number of families with that name), or a deliberate reference?
Wikipedia states that something in the 19th century U.S. called “the Mercer Girls project” – and the probably not as bad as you think film “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” – inspired the 1968-70 comedy “Western” series “targeted at young women”, “Here Come the Brides” about the importation of marryable women to primitive Seattle. This is the one that Barbara Hambly decided to insert Mr. Spock and Klingons into in novel “Ishmael” since Spock’s father (actor Mark Lenard) was there already. And “Star Trek” itself had put “Mudd’s Women” on TV in 1966, a story described as “duplicating a page from the Old West”. Is this covered…
Wikipedia states that something in the 19th century U.S. called “the Mercer Girls project” – and the probably not as bad as you think film “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” – inspired the 1968-70 comedy “Western” series “targeted at young women”, “Here Come the Brides” about the importation of marryable women to primitive Seattle. This is the one that Barbara Hambly decided to insert Mr. Spock and Klingons into in novel “Ishmael” since Spock’s father (actor Mark Lenard) was there already. And “Star Trek” itself had put “Mudd’s Women” on TV in 1966, a story described as “duplicating a page from the Old West”. Is this covered…
A musical comedy inspired by the Rape of the Sabine Women, via “The Sobbin’ Women”, by Stephen Vincent Benét.
I’m quite fond of the series and also wondered why it wasn’t more popular. Something I particularly liked was the overlapping events from different viewpoints between the novels. That is, the first part of the second novel covers the same events as the end of the first, but from the Earth viewpoint rather than Rosinante’s. A similar overlap occurs between the second and third novels.
The sexual elements not only didn’t age well, they didn’t begin well. Even back in the 80s I thought they felt out of place, even tacked on. Perhaps an editor said “Hey Gilliland, you need to spice these up a bit to boost sales”? But apart from that, I very much enjoyed the books.
Well alas, none of the half dozen libraries I have cards from have these eBooks, nor does the one I physically go to have them as books. Oh well.
Guess I should just try and read The Expanse then.
…While I’m looking for novellas because standard novels are taking over a month…
Aren’t there a bunch of Expanse novellas?
I am a big fan of the Wizenbeak novels, which I also found inexplicably underrated, and now virtually forgotten. Fantasy to Rosinante’s SF, but also heavy on the political intrigue and people with surprising skills putting them to surprisingly unexpected uses. The series is the source of one of my favorite quotes “Those whom we have harmed we cannot forgive.” I find it a powerful explanatory lens to look at many human interactions.
I am so late to this discussion!
I loved the Rosinante trilogy! And also End of the Empire and Wizenbeak. After a few rereads, the depth of description of the engineering began to bore me so perhaps the exposition needed work.
I lived in South Korea for many years around 2000 and at that time, there was a thriving mail-order bride business. It got to the point that some other Asian nations restricted travel from their countries to South Korea – I think Cambodia was one. I am not saying anything good about the ‘brides’ sent to the Munditos but I am saying it is perhaps not as far-fetched as Nicoll thinks.
I wanted more stories from Gilliland but I think he was pretty old when Rosinante came out. This may explain the lack of new novels.