Tracer - Rob Boffard

As an action thriller, Rob Boffard's Tracer is fast moving and purposeful. As a science-fiction book, it's a lot less convincing. It's well researched and the situation is credible, but it doesn't really take advantage of the situation to explore any new ideas.

The SF premise is promising. The planet now destroyed, the population of Earth now live on Outer Earth, a constructed ring of six sector above the planet. Due to the limited means for producing food and retaining water, existence is precarious. It's also precarious when you're Tracer like Riley Hale. One of the Devil Dancers, Riley is a courier who knows her way around the ship better than anyone, but its always a risky job transporting unknown goods. Life is about to get more precarious, with the growing presence of a cult called Sons of the Earth, who believe Earth can recover and replenish if they destroy all mankind.

There is no shortage of action or momentum as Riley races from one dangerous situation to the next, and the stakes are undoubtedly high, but in reality the plot of Tracer is thin and motivation is weak. Some effort is made to give the villain of the piece Darnell some family history and background, but little of it is meaningful. Ultimately, he has all the characteristics of a Batman villain without the colourful costume, cutting into TV broadcasts (complete with crackly static) and making terrorising threats of imminent death and destruction.

That's fun as far as it goes, and there are some promising areas opened up later in the book, but in terms of SF ideas there are no great human or scientific questions explored here other than survival. Even that is brutally handled, the level of violence and the vicarious wholesale slaughter that occurs every couple of pages is dishearteningly free and callous, with even significant characters blithely wiped out in the stroke of a pen. Action scenes leave no cliche unturned ("You go ahead, I'm injured, so I'll stay back and hold off the overwhelming odds against you single-handedly to buy you some time" type of situations).

Although mostly restricted to a lot of running and fighting, the scope opens up a little by the time we reach the conclusion, and there are undoubtedly other areas of Outer Earth for a Tracer to explore in Book 2. A little more SF and a little less comic book villainy and there could be interesting things to come.

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