Imagine a future where the British Empire has risen to control interstellar space, controlling and administering the cosmos on behalf of aliens and foreigners who can't be trusted to do it themselves.
In this faintly steampunk future, Captain Isambard Smith, a repressed English gentleman with school issues and a perfectly waxed moustache, must take to the skies abord the John Pym. His crew is a collection of motley misfits, as befits any tale of derring-do worth its salt. A sex android pilots the ship on the grounds that she's the one who has the Haynes manual. Suruk the Slayer, an M'Lak warrior, carries shopping bags to store the severed heads of his enemies. Gerald the hamster is the ship's mascot, and arguably the most competent of the whole bunch of them.
As the British Empire gears up for war against the insectoid Ghast, and the insanely zealous Edenites, Smith is dispatched to a hippy colony to collect Rihanna Mitchell, a politically correct hippy who may possibly be a psychic superweapon. On the way, tea is drunk.
Toby Frost's debut novel rocks along at a brisk pace and despite clearly being a comedy novel, it never lets the jokes get in the way of the story. In fact the humour lifts the mood in an adventure story which has an alarmingly high body count!
The central gag, that Victorian Britain somehow rules space through tea, moral fibre and good bearing, isn't laboured in this book, although Britain's antagonistic relationship with the French is referenced pretty frequently. The set-up comes over mostly through the character of Isambard Smith. Heroic, chivalrous, ruthless, gung-ho, quite stupid, incredibly lucky and English to the core, Smith is a fantastic comic creation who can always be counted on to say the wrong thing in the heat of the moment. My personal highlight was his ranting about his school days while disintegrating Ghast troopers in one of the novel's climactic battles.
He also has a strong line in catchphrases. 'I'll settle your hash' crops up several times like a public school Terminator, and a successful mission tends to lead to a line about 'tiffin'.
There are also some knowing parodies of other works. Rick Dreckitt is a brilliant inverted parody of Blade Runner's Deckard - an android bounty hunter who's terrified he may actually kill an android by mistake. Frost's interpretation of Philip K Dick's Voigt Kampff test is utterly brilliant and prompted belly laughs from this reader. Suruk the Slayer is probably supposed to be a Predator, but I've never seen that film.
This book is never going to be remembered as a classic, but it works both as a comedy novel and as an adventure story. There's very little to say about it that is negative - maybe the occasional joke doesn't quite work - on its own terms it's a stunning debut and sets up huge anticipation for the further adventures of Isambard Smith.
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In the 25th Century the British Space Empire thrives in Earth's corner of the Milky Way. ... more
The only threat is the gathering menace of the evil Ghast Empire whose arachnoid stormtroopers are hell bent on galactic domination and the extermination of all hu...
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