Angel Station Review
Title: Angel Station
Author: Walter Jon Williams
Date Purchased: 10/5/2017
Price Paid: $1.05
Date Finished: 5/19/2021
Rating: 3.5/5
One of the more interesting choices that a science fiction author can make revolves around the use of language. If we look at this through a very wide lens, we might be able to boil it down to two choices: speak of things in the same way that people currently do (and by currently I mean whenever the book was written), or invent a slew of new terms and jargon, reflecting how things have changed.
They both offer their upsides. The first allows the author to just write and not have to worry about explaining something to the reader. The second will more accurately reflect how a society changes over time. I think about this often enough – if I was to hop in a time machine and go speak to Dan from 20 years ago, I would say words that confused him…because things change.
Walter Jon Williams certainly takes the second approach with Angel Station, but it’s not just the vernacular that makes this book stand out.
In Angel Station we join two people, Ubu and Maria, as they try to make a living after the death of their “father”. I put that word in quotes for a very specific reason: both of the kids were genetically engineered and are not really related. This distinction becomes important later on in the book so you don’t wind up questioning the relationship that Ubu and Maria have with each other.
Language is an important thing, and Williams doesn’t try to mollycoddle the reader by explaining things. We are left to infer, from context, what a lot of the words they use are…some of them are simple words with new meanings, and others are describing a foreign concept. It’s a powerful tool and one that has lost me in the past, but William does a good job of drawing the reader to the proper spots.
The story was one that has elements I knew I would enjoy – some hacker type computer things, heist level secret planning, mystery and intrigue…it’s all here to one degree or another. As we meet the characters, they are down on their luck. Business deals are falling through, bad decisions are made, and they wind up on the run from the law. It looks like things are going from bad to worse.
And then they meet the aliens.
When I think about the aliens I’ve seen in many science fiction works, they all seem to be based in something we are comfortable with, which seems highly unlikely. The Gamorreans from the Star Wars universe were just humanoid pigs. Most of the alien races in Star Trek were just different looking humans. Even Doctor Who winds up with humanoid shaped aliens.
But these are different. First, the aliens operate under an almost hive-mind like state where there is a supreme intellect that makes the decisions and those are carried out by the aliens who follow them. Their physical composition is fluid and changeable – they can be “programmed” to have a stronger structure to withstand gravity or a more resilient form for high-G space travel. But most importantly, as a creature serving a supreme intellect they have no sense of self.
This is, at the core, a first contact story. When they meet the aliens the entire book changes tone and tempo, which in many ways reflects what might happen when two species meet for the first time. I struggled a little with the book in the middle parts, and I think a lot of that had to do with the tempo shift. But looking back on it now I can appreciate it a bit more.
Overall I enjoyed this book. The aliens brought a really new perspective to the first contact story, and the plot was enjoyable. I wasn’t crazy about the Ubu’s character arc, and Maria’s was only slightly less jarring, but it wasn’t enough to make me dislike the book.
Final Thoughts: Well worth the read, with a fresh take on aliens.