The Intrepid: Dawn Of The Interstellar Age
Arnie Benn 2023 Quicycle Press 484 pages
Winner, Literary Titan Book Award (2023)
Gold Medal, FAPA President’s Book Award (2023)
I haven’t had a great deal of luck with Amazon’s Kindle freebies. There was the one with the water ice roads on the Moon, or the sappy lovestruck hero-worshipping supergenius female operative. But regression toward the norm kicked in, and the past few times I’ve had better luck. In fact, in addition to Intrepid, there were several worth writing reviews on. But Intrepid deserves to be moved to the front of the queue, because Arnie Benn’s premiere novel is truly something extraordinary.
First, it is true “hard” SF, with high levels of scientific literacy and reasonably fastidious adherence to plausible still-imaginary technology and knowledge. On the level of Andy Weir, Jim al-Khalili, or Peter Cawdron. Oh, Benn does play fast and loose with orbital dynamics, but it’s the sort of plot spackle that ALL fictions have to use at one point or another. He has his own version of an inertialess drive, and while not very accurate, my vision of it was a drive that fooled the universe into thinking the ship was one very large photon.
The characters seem a bit tentative in the first few chapters, and one has the feeling that Benn was getting to know them himself. (In an afterword, he says he bases his characters on various actors, using personae and actual personalities as templates for his characters. I think most authors, to one extent or another, incorporate parallel approaches to building their cast.) But the main characters become considerably more complex as the plot unfolds.
The plot itself is a thing of glory, a First Contact story as unique and original as the best work from Clarke or Cawdron. It starts out as a rather pedestrian story of a fusion ship on its way to Proxima Centauri, a 4.5 light year haul that they hope to complete in 20 years ship’s time. But about half way there, another ship pulls up alongside them. Over seven years, Earth has developed a new and far faster drive—a photonic drive. Upon being awakened, they learn one of their crew was killed in hibernation by something that was very unlikely to have been an accident.
They group together in the Centaurion II (they were model one, of course) and continue on to the planet, a super-Earth with 1.2 gravity. And find a third Earth ship is already there. The Intrepid.
And something else, something not made by humans.
Benn has a future history backstory, one that displays an amazing grasp of international geo-politics along with an informed and thoroughly plausible extrapolation based on regional histories over the century prior to launch.
The story unfolds into something mystical and lyrical indicating that humanity is about to move into a much wider and more sophisticated existence and training begins for what Benn calls “stage three” of consciousness and awareness.
The result, emotionally and intellectually, is a blend of Childhood’s End, Martian Chronicles, and 2001, while resembling none of those greats.
As a first novel, it’s right up there with Pollard’s Bad Dog, Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself, or Clarke’s Against the Fall of Night. If you love intelligent, hard, intellectually challenging science fiction, put Intrepid at the top of your list.