Another Calgary acquisition, one I had gone with the intention of acquiring, was fellow Edge author Adrian Bedford’s first novel, Orbital Burn. Immediate conflict of interest statement: I’m published by the same publisher, and Brian gave me a copy. So there’s bias. Having confessed that, I can now enthuse. There’s the odd rough spot, but I read it while heat-sick and hiding in a basement, feeling sorry for myself, and I still liked it a great deal.

It has a great first sentence, a classic SF first sentence: “One morning, not long before the end of the world, a dead woman named Lou sat drinking expresso in Sheb’s Old Earth Diner, one of the few places still open in the cheap part of Stalktown.” Lou is a freelance, unlicenced PI. As a privileged, feckless eighteen-year-old she fell victim to “accelerated tissue necrosis nanovirus”, released with murderous malice at a party. Now she exists with the help of nanotechnology that rebuilds her body as swiftly – more or less – as the nanovirus causes it to decay, but the nanotechnology wears out and needs topped up, so her existance is as precarious as her tenuous cash-stream. Lou’s decay – described effectively – is paralleled by the decay of Kestrel, her home colony, which is about to be destroyed out by an asteroid; the affluent are long gone, and the dispossessed huddle around the Stalk, the space elevator, in hopes of being lifted off in time. Lou is delaying her own departure, knowing that it is likely to mean loss of her livelihood and shortly thereafter, disintegration. When, into Sheb’s Old Earth Diner comes Dog, a cybernetically enhanced beagle, who hires her to look for his adopted charge, a retarded, sickly biological android boy for whom he has been caring. The boy has been kidnapped and Lou is the last PI in Stalktown.

If I go much further, I risk spoilers. Suffice to say, Lou comes up against the usual hazards of a down-and-out PI as she moves through the mean and crumbling streets and towers of Kestrel: lawless cops, the amoral elite, the thoroughly untrustworthy ex, and a client with his own secrets. Kestrel is grim, pitiful and memorable: the decaying neighbourhoods, the abandoned luxury residences. This being SF, there are a number of other forces that also cross Lou’s path, on her way to a resolution that would be an SF cliche were it not so right for Lou’s psychological journey. She was young and still maturing when she died; she has, in a way, been frozen in time. She has a resolution to reach, things to learn about love and acceptance, and the book has a tangible (at least to me) theme. The integration of character and setting, theme and resolution, and the sense of place are the book’s strengths, along with an unabashed echo of its influences, 40s and 50s hardboiled PI and classic SF novels.

Some faint damns among the praise. The viewpoint strayed during the first couple of chapters before settling into Lou’s head; perhaps in an attempt to solve the information transfer problem. There is some action that sets up one of the key scenes in the book that seems forced and need not; the elements are already there to support Lou’s reaction, but are not deployed effectively. But the scene it leads into – I don’t think I’d be giving much away when I say it is a courtroom scene – is one of my favorites. Along with the one in which Lou’s mysterious rescuer tries to elicit the former party-girl’s thoughts about her soul. In Bedford’s Universe, humanity, and law, has to accommodate biological androids, the walking dead, and sentient computers.