Calculating the Deep Space Adventure of Binary/System

Sometimes, we need to remember to turn around and go the other way—like The Firesign Theater proclaimed a few decades ago: forward into the past! It’s reason enough to embrace a book like Eric Brown’s Binary/System, a wild, deep-space, hostile planet adventure throwback that brings to mind the serialized days of Flash Gordon, John Carter, and just about any vintage sci-fi paperback, beautifully festooned with colorfully bizarre creatures battling on some distant planet.
Brown doesn’t waste time getting the action going—the first sentence describes a cataclysmic fusion core explosion destroying the massive starship Pride of Amsterdam as it passes through a lunar wormhole. With only seconds to spare, heroic lead Cordelia Kemp (a woman as hero—so it’s not a complete throwback) wrangles an escape pod—which, due to the soul sucking physics of the wormhole, hurtles her hundreds of light years into deepest regions of unexplored space.
Luckily for Kemp, more or less, she manages to crash land her pod (or was she shot down?) on the planet Valinda, a rugged, barely hospitable world with short hot summers and long cold winters. (Think Westeros.) It’s not long before she encounters the native opposing inhabitants of Valinda, which include a race of sword-wielding insectile warriors and their peace-loving monkey-like slaves, adorned with bright blue fur. Match that with kindly giant spiders, carnivorous night creatures, humongous Dune-like worms, and there are plenty of other deadly obstacles in Kemp’s path to fill a book (or, in this case, what was originally two lengthy novellas) as she struggles to keep her head on her shoulders, forging alliances, eluding danger, and discovering the deep, dark truths about Valinda.
To avoid chapters full of Kemp’s inner expository dialogue, Brown develops a fun workaround: like all humans of her era, she has an all-knowing computer implant—cleverly known as Imp—that does all the mental heavy-lifting and deducing for her. Imp can study air quality, analyze food sources, plot strategy, translate alien languages, and offer much-needed morale support. It’s sort of like having a less whiny C-3P0 living inside your head. Without Imp life on Valinda would be much more difficult for Cordelia Kemp.

There is something ridiculously refreshing about falling into a story that doesn’t try to baffle its reader with complex future science and machinations. Instead, we spend a breezy 400 pages or so riding a crazy adventure wave on a distant planet full of odd creatures. What’s not to like about an action sequence in which characters travel the digestive tract of giant worm—all the way, I might add—as a means of express travel? Brown, author of the Helix and Bengal Station series, presents Binary/System as a standalone thrill ride, another rarity in these days of mandatory multi-volume sagas.
There is, however, plenty of room for the author revisit Kemp and company if necessary—and I would be more than ready to take that ride.
Binary/System is available now.