In the Black by Patrick S. Tomlinson, Tor Books, October 13th, 2020
I can’t begin this review without at least briefly discussing the author as it was his online antics that led me to seeking out this book in the first place. Patrick S. Tomlinson, though he would vehemently deny it, is what is known online as a “lolcow“. For the unfamiliar, this is any online personality that can be milked endlessly for laughs. Not to say this is an achievement but Tomlinson has to date been lot more successful at this than any of his other endeavours. A YouTube channel called ‘Cryptic Web Chronicles” goes over much of the related online dramas but I caution anyone unfamiliar, that this quite a rabbit hole to travel down. It is a strange and amusing journey but there are also many moments of darkness along the way.
The main reason he has become a lolcow is his refusal to follow one of the most ancient rules of the Internet which is “Don’t feed the trolls”. Rather than block and move on from the various trolls he encounters, he actively responds; mainly through his X account. Before beginning this review I went and captured this example of his repeated responses to various trolls.
One can check his replies on almost any day of the week and find much the same thing filling up his feed.
The most notable of his many failed endeavours is as a military science-fiction writer which according to his Amazon author page dates back to late 2015. He seems to have been picked up by Tor Books after a few years and the subject of this review is his most recent (and last) published book from late 2020. As I write, it is getting close to five years since this book was released and the cover is still used as the banner on his X account. Given that he published a book every year from 2015 to 2020 and has published nothing since, one can’t help but assume his publisher has dropped him. That or he decided not to finish what he started here and after reading In the Black, I can’t say it would be much of a loss if this is in fact the case.
I didn’t buy this book and wouldn’t have bothered seeking it out were that my only option. Luckily (at least for authors like Tomlinson), public libraries in much of the English speaking world are Tor Book’s best and most consistent customers. My library stocks five copies of this book and I’m the only one currently borrowing it. By contrast, there are only three copies of Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and they’re all checked out with pending holds.
I was assuming (and frankly hoping), that this would be a typical gamma self-insert Marty Stu story that I could make fun of. To Tomlinson’s credit, I couldn’t find any obvious hint of this within apart from the way some of the male characters are written. I also have to credit him for what was an immediately engaging prologue that had me initially wondering if I’d got him completely wrong. It is a simple set-up describing the workings of a drone in deep space shortly before it is destroyed; a simple but effective way to begin the story that connects well with the title.
Unfortunately, this solid opening soon crumbles towards the end of the prologue when we are introduced to the crew of the CCDF Ansari and Captain Susan Kamala.
Susan swung her feet out into space and hopped down from her bunk. “Who is it?” she called to the hatch.
“Azevedo, mum,” her Brazilian XO answered.
“Miguel, you do know it’s . . .” Susan glanced at the chrono in her augmented reality retinal display. “. . . 0350, right?”
“Yes, mum. It’s important.”
Susan sighed. “Isn’t it always? Just a minute. Unless you insist on seeing your captain in her undies?”
“Not if you paid me a bonus, mum.”
“I’m not actually sure how to take that, Miguel.”
“Anytime there’s a question, default to respect, mum.”
Susan smiled. “You’re a smart kid; I’ll just be a moment.”
I could (and have), been persuaded to take a female leader seriously but it is quite impossible with dialogue like this. Being this familiar with the crew wouldn’t do much good for discipline on an actual military vessel. Something else that jumped out was the use of “mum” which to speakers of proper English, is the same as calling her “mom”. Tomlinson takes no time to explain this so I assume it is a replacement for “mam” or “sir” but I could never got used to the crew calling their commanding officer “mum”. However given the childish use of words like “undies” and unnecessary vulgarity in the pages that follow, it is somewhat fitting that this crew calls their commanding officer “mum”.
While he does not explain the odd form of address, Tomlinson does explain in Chapter 1 the reason for the female captain as well as a majority female crew:
[Miguel] was, at present, the only man in the CIC, the rest of the stations filled by women and whatever Ensign Broadchurch settled on, if they cared to.
This wasn’t unusual. Indeed, the Ansari‘s crew complement was sixty-four percent female, which was right in line with crew breakdowns in the rest of the fleet. The demands of long-duration deep-space operations favored female recruits in a myriad of ways. Psychologically, women trended more toward cooperation and conflict resolution, while men tended to be more confrontational and competitive, which could cause friction and personality conflicts on long voyages. Women’s bodies had been found long ago to have a slight edge when it came to tolerating high-g maneuvering. And most importantly, the average woman’s daily caloric requirements were just sixty percent that of the average male, making their onboard food stores and aeroponics capacity last that much longer.
Indeed, the men who did manage to overcome these selection biases had to be very good to earn a slot. Of course, they had a very strong incentive to study hard and get a billet. If they did, they guaranteed themselves a place aboard a sealed metal tube where they were outnumbered two-to-one by young, physically fit women for eight to sixteen months at a time.
Needless to say, everyone was on birth control, and a lot of unauthorized “hot-bunking” went overlooked by the selection heads.
There is an awful lot of nonsense in the passage above. The average caloric intake immediately jumps out as most females you see in the crowd photos at the Hugo Awards (as well as many of the nominees), would have to be tripling my own intake to get to the size they are. I won’t itemise each error but I can’t resist mentioning Commander Yvonne Gray formerly of the HMNZS Manawanui which sunk in 2024 after running into a reef while under her command. This was the first vessel of the Royal New Zealand Navy to be lost since World War II and the first in peace time. Quite an achievement. Then there is Lt. j.g. Sarah B. Coppock who was officer of the deck when the USS Fitzgerald collided with a merchant vessel off the coast of Japan in 2017; resulting in the death of seven sailors. That’s two completely avoidable naval disasters during peacetime where women were directly accountable. One has to imagine this would be multiplied significantly in wartime.
Unlike her real life counterparts, Susan Kamala has plot armour and an almost telepathic ability to anticipate her enemy whether alien or human. She is also an Indian woman named Kamala who I have to assume is named after the ineligible foreign woman running for Vice President in 2020; the year the novel was published. She is in most ways a very typical girl-boss as this passage illustrates:
This led immediately to a d***-measuring contest between the two of them that only ended when Susan herself stepped in and reminded everyone involved, that indeed, she had the biggest d***, and politely requested the pilot turn over control to his shuttle for terminal maneuvers, on account that, while he was certainly very talented, he was not accustomed to parking next to high-temp fusion plants and thermonuclear warheads.
The novel is full of this sort of dialogue as well as a lot of the typical sarcasm and snark that worked much better for Joss Whedon than any of his imitators:
Susan remained seated, but her voice inched up and her tone sharpened. “Oh, my apologies, Governor. I was running under the impression that was why I was here with my giant warship. What with the hundreds of megatons of nukes in our silos and all, I must have gotten confused.” She took off her top cover and handed it up to the fuming woman. “Here, do you want to make the transfer of command official right now? Otherwise, you’ve wasted a trip, and you’re officially wasting my time.”
As well as snark and sarcasm, there is also a lot snorting in response:
Tyson actually snorted in amusement.
And here is one more general example from late in the book to make it clear I’m not just cherry-picking:
“We’re putting a respectful distance between us and our guests. Admiral Perez’s command is brand new and I wouldn’t want to scuff her paint. It hurts the resale value, you know.”
“Ah, okay. Because it sounded to me like you just ordered your navigation officer to put thirty-thousand kilometers or so between us and where our newest flagship expects us to be an hour and a half from now, which just happens to be outside its effective weapons envelope, but too close to make a safe micro jump, forcing them to close the distance with fusion rockets before they could engage, and then casually told your drone integration officer to lie about it.”
“You have a very suspicious mind, Miguel. Has anyone ever told you that?”
“It’s been mentioned, yes. So we’re not standing down from battle stations, then?”
That’s a hard no.”
“Aaaaand I’m not recalling the flight of missile we just floated,” Warner posited.
Tomlinson also can’t resist preaching within the pages with this passage being the most notable:
Guns were illegal for private ownership on the planet and had been from the earliest days of the colony. Only the police were allowed them, and even then only among the Critical Response Team, which had a great deal of additional specialized training for dealing with hostage rescue, active attacker situations, and the like. Guns were occasional smuggled in and used in crimes, but customs and security at the spaceport were highly competent and made sure such occurrences were exceedingly rare. Murderers had to be a bit more creative as a result, but this was the first time Tyson had heard of a nail driver being used.
The context for this is a brief murder mystery subplot which does at least have relevance to the main narrative.
The plot of this dreck is drawn from is based around Kamala’s ship pursuing an alien Xre ship, which has violated treaty lines that have existed for decades after a war a few generation earlier. The drone in the beginning was the victim of one of the first shots that violates the treaty. Most of this leads to some cat and mouse between the two ships which has all the gravity as an episode of Star Trek. And Tomlinson seems to have had exactly this when writing the moments on the bridge:
Susan leaned forward in her chair and turned her shoulders as if she was on camera, which she wasn’t.
There is also a side story focusing on Tyson Abington, a corporate executive from Ageless Corporation on planet Methuselah. Get it? His story isn’t connected with the main events on the Ansari until right at the end and will (or would have), become more important in the sequel. His story mostly revolves around a number of things going wrong for his company including a plague which he employs Elsa, a young female doctor to help with. This had me wondering if he might be a self-insert for Tomlinson, especially when his female A.I. acquires a convincing synthetic body and tries to seduce him. His behaviour in that passage (which I’ll spare you from quoting), has him acting a lot less like the alpha he supposedly is. This is not the case though as Tomlinson expresses dislike for the character in his Acknowledgments at the end and Abington is a lot slimmer and healthier than Tomlinson. The way he writes the men within the pages suggests he doesn’t understand them though he certainly is male.
It isn’t just the snark that bothers me about the writing, it is also the frequent clichés with these two being the most hackneyed:
“Doc. English, please,” Nakamura pleaded.
“She was speaking English, Takeshi,” Foz said.
“Could’ve fooled me.”
And:
Warner whistled low. “That’s going to leave a mark.”
It is stuff like this that suggests his influences were drawn a lot more from watching than they were from reading. I’m guessing mostly Star Trek, the Battlestar Galactica reimagining and Firefly.
Modern science fiction and fantasy in my experience are poor imitations of ideas found in much better works bonded awkwardly with identity politics, sexual perversion and vulgarity. Patrick S. Tomlinson’s In the Black is almost exactly like this only (mostly) bereft of sexually explicit content. I do have to admit that apart from the dialogue, the battles a decently written; particularly the one in the climax. The Xre are also interesting and the world building and asides explaining how certainly technology works is serviceable. I would go so far as to say that had he excised all the “modern” elements as well the subplot with Abington and brought the narrative to a close, that this would be a book that I could generally recommend. It isn’t though and with all the warts as well as the fact that it isn’t even finished, I absolutely do not recommend it.
To end on a positive, I will leave readers with my favourite passage from the book:
Susan looked down at the peanut butter and jelly sandwich hovering dangerously close to her open mouth and sighed. She was famished, and the sandwich represented the first shot of carbs and protein she’d had in twelve hours.