Kool Aid Served Daily

Warning, spoilers abound ahead.

I started this one on the plane ride back from Denver. I didn't finish it that night, which says something about my interest. I think the heroine, CC, got pushed down a crevice on an asteroid, and I was upset that she hadn't learned yet that she always got a push in the back when near an edge.

The blurb on the cover reads:

"Classic science fiction that will put Shwartz squarely in the top rank of science-fiction storytellers, alongside the likes of Asimov and Heinlein." -- Amazing Stories

Well, it does remind me of early Heinlein - an idealistic youngster goes off to space and runs into reality.

What I really like about the characterization of CC is that she is idealistic, yet in a very cut throat civilization. Shwartz takes the worst of our recent corporate culture and extends it to an overpopulated future. Everyone gets a PhD, because there is nothing else to do. Actually, getting a PhD is a social stigma, because it means you come from the lower classes. In CC, we see an academic who has to have surgery, dictation lessons, acting lessons, etc, to throw off her background.

She becomes an alpha executive, with a type A personality. She is sent to an asteroid to take care of some business. She leaves behind a fiance, one who from a better family. She is scared of failing.

She finds that frontier society is not as stratified. For example, the highest socially ranking family which comes out with her actually wants the frontier life and mingles with people from opposite ends of the spectrum. I like that Shwartz does manage to pull off a both a stagnant society and lay the groundwork for how it will eventually crumble in the dynamics of the frontier.

But, CC is almost totally clueless. She finds people, actually almost an entire society, who have thrown away everything she hated back on Earth and are actually thriving in their freedom. She keeps on getting told she fits a mold of an aggressive middle executive and she should let up. She falls in love and doesn't realize it.

She has an old enemy who acts stupid and when he slips up, she doesn't clue in that he is the one trying to kill her. In my view, this is how CC fits the classic Heinlein characterization, the Hollywood ideal. Shwartz did go past this with her vision of a believable cultural and economic system. It felt more plausible, more raw/dynamic that Hollywood norm. I did get the feeling that society was on the cusp of being ripped apart. And CC could be an agent of that change if she wanted to start being proactive.

And I did appreciate that, at the end she was not mad when her fiance dumps her, she realized she was just as shallow and upperly mobile has David IV. It gave me hope that she was starting to be honest with herself and could get rid of her nightmares.