Plutoshine

By: Lucy Kissick

Narrated by: Toby Longworth

Length: 11 hrs

Publisher's summary

Shortlisted for the 2023 Arthur C. Clarke Award!

Terraforming - the megascale-engineering of a planet's surface to one more Earth-like - is now commonplace across the Solar System, and Pluto's is set to be the most ambitious transformation yet. Four billion miles from the Sun and two hundred degrees below zero, what this worldlet needs is light and heat. Through captured asteroids and solar mirrors, humanity's finest scientists and engineers are set to deliver them.

What nobody factored in was a saboteur - but who, and why?

From the start, terraformer Lucian is intrigued by nine-year-old Nou, silent since a horrifying incident that shook the base and upended her family into chaos. If he could reach her, perhaps he could understand what happened that day - and what she knows about the secrets of Pluto. 

Nou possesses unspoken knowledge that could put a stop to the terraforming. Gripped by her fears, unable to trust her family, there is no one she can talk to. Only through Lucian's gentle friendship will she start to rediscover her voice - and what she has to say could transform our understanding of the Universe.

©2022 Lucy Kissick (P)2022 Orion Publishing Group

Terraforming framed as a whodunnit

It would be hard for a story about terraforming Pluto to avoid the shadow of Kim Stanley Robinson works like the Mars books, Icehenge, or The Memory of Whiteness. What Lucy Kissick wisely does to distinguish her story is focus the scope by using the conventions of a whodunnit: a tangle of mysteries; a curious focaliser who works past misunderstandings, interspersed with flashbacks and unfolding pictures from other characters’ perspectives; a couple of shell games to obscure the hidden plot; and a denouement neatly explaining it all after a fairly gripping climax.
It’s refreshing to see this territory (and these landscapes) addressed in a novel way (even for a fan of Robinson’s broad sociological stuff), and something about the tight horizons of the setting suggest the tension of worlds small enough that awesome cosmic stories become personal ones.

Not all of that works smoothly: there were moments when authorial self-insert character Lucian’s obsession with a specific band and YA fantasy series stand out as kind of bare sketches of a future pop culture, and once could imagine the rapid-fire banter of pop references Charles Stross would have other characters mention to provide more context. And, while the landscape descriptions are sometimes poetically beautiful, things like the layout of the base or the actual shape of the planes flying in Pluto’s thin atmosphere are hard enough to picture at times that you realise they were under-described. It also takes a little commitment to ride out the protagonist’s bland sentimentality to the interesting emotional beats.

But Kissick’s novel angle of approach pays off, blending compassionate accounts of flawed characters responding to traumas, sense-of-wonder, and novel perspectives on human responses to the alien. It’s rewarding stuff, and I’d be keen for more by the same author.

Toby Longworth does good work performing the various characters, though it’s unfortunate that the mentor and love interest characters are harder to distinguish in any given scene than one would like.