This review of World of Water by James Lovegrove was written in 2017 for the British Science Fiction Association‘s magazine, Vector.
Solaris, 2016, Paperback, 390pp, £7.99, ISBN 978-1-78108-304-8
The story engine at the heart of Lovegrove’s Dev Harmer series is a sound one, with perhaps a small debt to the early adventures of a certain Time Lord who also travelled the universe, unsure where his travels would take him.
However, that’s where the similarities end.
Dev Harmer isn’t a Time Lord; he works for Interstellar Security Solutions (ISS), although not by choice. A former soldier in the war against the Polis+, he’s now an indentured servant for ISS, working to pay off his debts by serving as an intergalactic troubleshooter.
When there’s trouble on a human colony ISS send in Harmer – via a consciousness download, uploaded into a locally cloned body – to fix it. Dev never knows where he’s going, or what the problem is, until he gets there.
Arriving on the planet Robinson D, also known as Triton, Harmer discovers he has not one but two problems to deal with. First, is his actual mission: to discover why Triton’s aquatic but intelligent inhabitants have begun attacking the Earth colonists and to look for evidence of Polis+ involvement; second, is to complete his mission before the faulty clone body he was been uploaded into breaks down completely. Harmer has just 72 hours to complete his mission.
If he doesn’t, his consciousness won’t be downloaded from the collapsing clone body and sent onwards to its next mission and a new healthy body. He’ll die!
That’s the setup, revealed with shotgun speed in the first chapter, and it’s a good no-nonsense start. But it’s the only good thing about World of Water.
At first I thought Lovegrove might be parodying some of the sillier excesses of mil-sf out there, but as the story ground on and no jokes appeared, the horrible truth began to dawn: World of Water isn’t a parody, it’s serious; a dull, unimaginative slog played ridiculously, awfully straight. It could have been saved by taking the Pirates of the Caribbean route, becoming a fun action romp full of big guns, wisecracking heroes, dastardly aliens – maybe even a bit of swashbuckling on the high seas. If anyone could make this happen it would be James Lovegrove, many of whose previous books have kept me turning pages long after bedtime.
Sadly, this is not one of those books. Perhaps I’m missing something, perhaps there’s a deep and subtle subtext lying full fathom five deep, but if there is it’s drowned by some unadventurous world-building and lazy characterization.
This may only be Dev Harmer’s second book but it’s definitely my last.
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