Book Review: The Icarus Job, by Timothy Zahn
Zahn has another twisty SF spy thriller with a mystery you didn't know was there.
In The Icarus Plot, we run into two former bounty hunters who find themselves in the middle of a conspiracy to overthrow the galaxy monopoly on travel.
With The Icarus Twin, our heroes learned that the stakes are even more deadly than they first though.
Now, Gregory Roarke and his alien partner Selina find themselves ones more in the crosshairs. But not only are they on the hunt for more Icarus gates, they may discover the secrets of the civilization that made them.
The Story
In a universe where transportation is subsumed by the Paath monopoly, Gregory Roarke and his partner Selena have been hired by the Icarus program to find interstellar gates that allow instantaneous transportation between any two points in the galaxy.
But when their old organized crime employer reaches out to them with the offer of another Icarus gate, the payment is too good to turn down. Iracus wants the gate. The Paath want the gate.
The first problem is that the gate was stolen from the Paath.
The second problem is that in order to win the gate, Roarke and Selina must transport an assassin to her mission.
And the assassin herself is a target.
But if that were all there was to it, it wouldn’t be a Timothy Zahn novel. As always, nothing is what it seems, and nothing is simple. The opening bar fight serves four different purposes and the reader doesn’t find out all of those implications until near the end of the book.
This is another multi-sided chess game played on a roller-coaster. Icarus wants the gate. The Paath want the gate back. Hunters are after the assassin. The assassin is playing a game by rules only she knows. The mafia has their own agenda.
Zahn’s writing is, as always, quick and efficient. A throwaway character on the first page, who we never see again in the book, gets this description.
“Oberon’s lovely little niche market of organizing slave- on -slave and prisoner- on- prisoner death battles to amuse the more degenerate of the wealth class hadn’t exactly endeared him to the general hunt population. It was a good bet that anyone in here who knew him well enough to stick their neck out for him probably wouldn’t bother. More likely they would settle back and enjoy the show.”
Nice, quick and efficient writing, all the way down.
Agatha Christie maintained that the trick to writing a mystery was to keep showing the reader the key to everything throughout the entire story. Some people describe Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer mysteries as going so fast, you don’t realize that the clues are right in front of you. Timothy Zahn’s Icarus novels go so fast, the reader doesn’t realize that there’s even a mystery to be solved, despite giving you every single bit of information, and flat-out telling you what’s happening every step of the way. The reader is even told, in chapter four, the key to the mystery, but it isn’t spelled out until the very end.
If there was any justice in the world, Timothy Zahn would already be an official grandmaster of science fiction.
The Characters
As Zahn is the man who created the Star Wars expanded universe’s Mara Jade, we all know he can write espionage, and characters who can think their way through problems. In spy terms, “the wilderness of mirrors” is often used to describe the nature of the espionage world, where nothing is as it seems. Some people get lost in the wilderness of mirrors; Gregory Roarke lives there, has set up permanent housing and as multiple escape routes through it. Some moments, I’m not sure Roarke knows who’s scamming who, or even who he is scamming.
And as in the last two books, Roarke seems to have been raised by a father named Maverick, but he always has endless sayings from his father.
“As my father used to say, The best strategy in a barroom fight is to stay completely out of it. I’d always considered that wise advice. Of course, as he also used to say, That probably won’t work if you’re the one that started it.”
And that’s the opening line. Other gems include
“Sometimes subtlety just isn’t worth the effort. In those cases, and with those people, make sure you have a brick handy.
I await the day that we get to meet his father, because I suspect he will steal a whole novel, just by showing up in the last five pages.
Roarke’s partner Selene is interesting in that she’s an alien who thinks enough like Roarke that she can communicate whole paragraphs to him in one line of dialogue.
Then there is “Nikki,” the assassin with some interesting principles, and even more interesting upgrades.
And then there is the series antagonists, Director Nask, of the Paath. While Nask is nowhere near as interesting as Zahn’s Grand Admiral Thrawn, you can see that he was built in a similar mold. And he’s growing on me. Nask isn’t even lawful evil … maybe lawful a-hole.
And then, working for Nask are his thugs Huginn and Muninn. And you have to figure Zahn is just having fun.
The World
The world is integral to the plot. In fact, not only is Zahn creating a world for the current plot, he’s creating a world from the past, during the time of the first Icarus Gate construction. In the middle of all this chaos, Zahn still manages to slip in archaeology (Indian Jones style) and uses some of his deductions to move the rest of the story forward.
Not only does he know where Roarke’s story is going, he knows where the story of the gate creators already went. It’s a beautifully layered SF world.
Politics
The only politics here are the politics between people and cultures. All of which are fictional.
Content Warning
There is nothing truly alarming in this book. The most explicit language are on my notes.
Who is it for?
This is one part original Mission: Impossible with some extra layers of The Sting and Leverage, and then add a few more twists. The first scam is on the first page, and it does not stop until the last page.
Why buy it?
This is Timothy Zahn at his best, the top of his game. The Icarus Job is a perfect SF espionage mystery that runs at the pace of an action novel, with perfect writing. Dang it’s amazing.