One Way
The Frank Kittridge series, Book 1
S. J. Morden
Orbit
Fiction, Sci-Fi/Thriller
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: Once, architect Frank Kittridge was an ordinary man, a husband and a father and a respectable citizen... until he took the law into his own hands and shot the untouchable dealer who hooked his son on drugs. He may have had his vengeance, but it cost him his marriage and his freedom; he's not eligible for parole until well after his natural lifespan. But then he receives a very unusual offer from the tech giant XO. In exchange for helping build the first outpost on Mars, he'll be allowed to live out the remainder of his days on the red planet - still technically a prisoner, but freed from prison on Earth, and a part of truly groundbreaking science. He accepts, as do several other inmates at Panopticon private prisons throughout California. All of them have committed crimes worth extreme sentences, so Frank knows better than to consider any of them friends, but only together can they achieve their goals and survive on a new world. But will Mars truly bring any semblance of freedom, or have Frank and the others only signed their own death warrants?
REVIEW: On the classic sitcom The Golden Girls, there's an episode where the four ladies are attending a "murder mystery" dinner, and the "detective" is presenting the evidence. The hopelessly naïve Rose pipes up with a helpful suggestion: "Maybe that bloody dagger will lead us to the murder weapon." I found myself thinking of that line, of someone who cannot or will not see the damning clues right in front of them for what they are, for a significant portion of the back end of One Way. I should not have been thinking that about a character who, unlike Rose, was not only confronting a real problem in life-or-death circumstances, but was supposed to be focused, a little jaded, and of above-average intelligence.
The story opens with Frank in prison, receiving the unusual offer from XO via a lawyer, before heading to the private training facility deep in the desert where Frank and his companions of circumstance must learn their jobs and figure out how to cooperate despite all of them being criminals. Each chapter opens with internal memos and conversations between XO executives and legal departments, showing the all-too-familiar greed and cruelty and downright sociopathic logic driving the whole project, information deliberately withheld from the test subjects. Even without that knowledge, though, I found it a little hard to believe that Frank wouldn't at least suspect some hinky behavior and motivation behind his "employer", given how brazen modern tech billionaires are about such things today; in Frank's near future, I can't imagine how they'd become any more discreet, especially considering the utter lack of significant consequences for their openness thus far. Those decisions shape the mission and its goals into something other than what the inmates are told... and that's before people start dying on Mars.
From shortly after they're woken from the suspended animation that made the trip through space cost-effective (as they weren't consuming resources on the journey - not that XO doesn't have the tech, but they didn't want to waste a penny more than they had to on mere prisoners), death is a constant companion to their efforts to build a permanent habitat for future missions. It is an inherently hostile and deadly environment, so one or two deaths might be expected, but soon enough questions start arising even in Frank's mind - questions he goes out of his way to dismiss, as, despite his experience on the wrong end of the law and years spent in prison, he seems almost impossibly naive. Not only are more than one of his fellow "Martians" violent offenders, but XO itself is hardly a holy church. Metaphoric bloody daggers are bristling all over the red planet before Frank begins to seriously entertain notions of murder, and even then the culprit is eye-rollingly obvious from early on, for all that Frank draws out the "investigation" overlong (leading to more collateral damage/death) before the final confrontation.
That said, there are some strong points in this book. The author is an actual rocket scientist, and his vision of a Martian outpost is full of technical details that bring the concept to life, as well as descriptions of the stark, alien landscape that's both forbidding and oddly beautiful. His ideas of how a private tech company, driven by profit (and personal megalomania) beyond all other considerations, would approach space colonization is also exceptionally plausible. But at some point I just got too frustrated with Frank's obtuseness in the face of evidence even a barely-educated idiot like myself could see clearly. The ending is suitably intense, though the final parts again have Frank underestimating just who and what he's dealing with in ways that are bound to stab him in the back in the next volume (which I'm not sure I'm interested enough in to pursue).
While I appreciated the hard science behind Morden's story and it had several interesting and exciting parts, the characters and plot itself had me grinding my teeth too much by the end for a solid four stars.
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