Sly Mongoose

Sly Mongoose
Tobias Buckell
Tor
ISBN: 978-0765319203
Fiction, Science Fiction
Reviewed by Chris Gerrib

I’ve become a big fan of the Caribbean-born writer Tobias Buckell since his first book, Crystal Rain, so I was quite thrilled to get an electronic advance copy of his latest book, Sly Mongoose. It was every bit as good as I hoped. Sly Mongoose is set in the same universe as Buckell’s previous books, but it’s a number of years later and features a different lead character, so it should be a good starting point for those not familiar with the world. Chapter One, available for download on the author’s website www.tobiasbuckell.com starts out with our lead character, Pepper, re-entering a planet’s atmosphere strapped to the back of an improvised heat shield.
The action just gets better from there. Pepper, a mercenary, is entering the planet Chilo from orbit. Much like our Venus, the surface of Chilo is completely uninhabitable due to crushing pressures and temperatures. However, at an altitude of 100,000 feet, the temperatures and pressures are Earth-normal, and breathable oxygen is buoyant. So the inhabitants live in floating cloud cities, and travel to and fro via airships. (Talk about a sensawunda!) The novel is an action-packed battle involving several distinct groups of humans, alien species both neutral and actively unfriendly, and zombies used as biological weapons. Buckell has a superb grasp of pacing and the writing of action sequences. He uses his Caribbean background to render dialects sharply, and has a good grasp of characters. But this is not just a space shoot-it-up. Buckell, thanks to his strong world-building, gets in some pointed political and social commentary. Sly Mongoose is a great book, written by one of the hot new writers on the science fiction scene. I highly recommend it.