Unto Leviathan - Richard Paul Russo

The Argonos is a huge starship travelling from star system to star system. It hasn’t made land in 14 years and the crew are getting restless. We are not sure why they are travelling – background details sketchy or non-existent – but we soon find that the crew themselves have no idea either where they are going or why. There are two main powers on the ship – the Captain Nikos Costa and the Bishop. The ship is built around a huge cathedral, so there is some sort of religious element to their mission – attempting to convert settlements they come across, preaching to the inhabitants. 

When they receive a signal from a planet they name Antioch, a team is sent down to investigate. This may be a chance to change the fortunes of the wandering ship. Mutiny is brewing, not just potentially from the bishop’s forces, but also from the service crew, lead by a dwarf Pär who recruits Bartolomeo, the captain’s aide and narrator of the story. On the planet there is a gruesome discovery which leads them on to the discovery of an alien vessel – the first evidence of an alien civilisation that they have ever come across.

The story is not complex, the writing is not deep, sophisticated or detailed. It is in fact quite basic. The background remains vague either through laziness or just lack of technical knowledge. Conveniently obscuring the deficiencies in the plot and the writing, all background into the ship’s history has been lost after the Repudiation – a plague that destroyed a third of the ship and all of their logs 273 years ago. But get this – the Church has secret archives! So they investigate these to see if they can find anything useful and what do they find? Nothing. There are none of the sophisticated worlds of Iain M Banks or Alastair Reynolds. “Uh, captain, something blew-up. We don’t know what caused it”, is about the depth of technical information we get here. This is definitely not hard-sf. 

You would expect to operate on a pure story-telling level without getting bogged down in technical details and the envisioning of imaginary worlds, but it doesn’t even manage that. After the mutiny, nothing has changed, there is no change in the balance of power – everything just continues and Bartolomeo regains his position and trust at the captain’s side. It’s like the end of a Star Trek episode where they press the reset button for the next episode, with what has happened previously having no effect on the overall story or furthering character development. The plot then slows down severely in the middle. During the investigation of the alien ship, which is over drawn-out, crew members begin to die under mysterious circumstances. It’s a pretty poor version of the Alien movie set-up.

There is potential for a decent novel here – enough to keep me reading to see where it was going, but in the end it doesn’t go anywhere. There are far too many open ended plot threads. What is the ships mission? Where did it come from? What happened on Antioch? Are there aliens on the ship? What is causing the mysterious behaviour and deaths of the investigating team on the alien ship? We don’t find out the answer to a single one of these questions raised. There’s barely much of a story, but even those elements that have potential don’t go anywhere. Unfortunately, the ending is anti-climatic, derivative of Alien again and even worse, open-ended. We never discover the purpose or the fates of any of the characters. Very disappointing.