Review: The Dabare Snake Launcher

The Dabare Snake Launcher by Joelle Presby
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a 3-star review. A better estimate of my experience is 3.5 stars. I just couldn't talk myself into rounding up to 4 stars.

The premise of this book is that a large company has developed the holy grail of a substance strong enough for use as the cable for a space elevator. They begin building that elevator. There is a great deal of corporate intrigue surrounding that project. The reader never experiences the process of developing that cable material.

A side problem is that they need an effective means for getting the construction materials from the Earth to outer space. Toward that end, they decide to build a rocket sled that will hurl rockets into the upper atmosphere where the rocket engines take over the task of boosting the payloads into orbit. The forces are too great to permit fragile payloads such as humans.

[a brief aside - there are a couple of interesting concepts for accomplishing that task that do not appear in the book. One is to build a long, sealed tube. The lower end of the tube would be far below the surface of the ocean. A closely fit baffle is lowered to the bottom of the tube. The payload is then lowered until it rests on the baffle. Valves are then opened allowing the pressure of the ocean to flood the bottom of the tube and force the baffle and payload upwards. Once the payload reaches a high enough altitude, rockets fire to boost it into orbit.

Another interesting concept is to spin the payload on a gyroscope with a horizontal axis. When everything is spinning fast enough, the payload is released upward into the atmosphere. Again, at a sufficient altitude, rockets fire boosting the payload the rest of the way into orbit.

Neither of these concepts appears in the book. I ran across them over the last decade. The author's concept is equally interesting/plausible. Back to the review.]

The space elevator's terrestrial base will be on Mount Kilimanjaro. Corporate/tribal/government negotiations make this possible. The reader never really experiences that process.

The company building the space elevator contracts out the construction of the sled to the family of one of the upper corporate executives. The corporate executives don't know about the relationship between the family and the executive that granted the construction contract. The family is an influential tribe in Africa.

The family needs a good location to build the sled. The best location they can find is the side of an active volcano that is controlled by another family. Well the land is controlled by the other family. But do they also control the volcano?

There is some modest family/tribal intrigue as the contract represents a windfall. Many of the family members are just living off of the trust without doing much to replenish those funds. There is a strong temptation to use the seed money to refill the trust rather than actually build the sled.

As an added feature, one of the family members is reputed to be the physical incarnation of a minor snake goddess. One of the younger family members somehow becomes the new manifestation of the goddess. There are religious/metaphysical connotations for the volcano as well. I'm not a fan of supernatural/religious agents actively influencing the plot of a science fiction novel. That other stuff is more properly situated in a fantasy novel.

There are moments of tension within the story. In some cases, the characters have to work through a problem. In a few cases, a modest amount of hand-wavium makes the problems go away. Characters experience the unavoidable consequences of aging, but otherwise, they never lose when they encounter a challenge.

The biggest reason why I just couldn't give this book 4 stars is that there isn't a whole lot of "science" in this supposed tale of "science fiction". The production of the cable happens elsewhere. The design of the space station is ever so briefly discussed within the context of governmental and corporate negotiations regarding the construction of the space station. The design of the sled is pre-packaged to the point where the construction of the sled facility occurs primarily in the background.

The one element that the book got exactly correct is the desire to keep any government from controlling the project. Corporations aren't presented as infallible, just better at managing large-scale projects.

Another enjoyable element was setting the story on the African continent. Rather than showing western governments and corporations rushing to "exploit" the locals, this story focuses on people engaging with one another as equally capable agents advancing their own interests while working to cooperate with others.

The plot was interesting even if it didn't contain much "science". The characters were well-developed. Overall, it was an enjoyable read that held my attention. The author clearly has the skills needed to write engaging books.

In summary, the following kept me from giving this a high rating:

- a focus on family dynamics
- a focus on corporate negotiations
- a dearth of real "science"
- religious/metaphysical deities influencing the plot


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