"Kane raised his hands, palm out. 'Truce,' he said. 'As far as I knew, we were only coming here to sift through the ruins. Nobody's even told Morgan that there's anybody alive up here yet.' He gave in to a yawn. 'Besides, we're not really in any condition to overthrow your way of life.'"
Lewis Shiner is an American writer of science fiction. Frontera was his first book. He went on to write several other novels and short stories, many of which have been described as cyberpunk.
In Frontera a group of Terrans journey to Mars in search of what they assume is an abandoned colony, finding instead a secret worth a great deal to the corporation responsible for their mission.
In terms of plot it's pretty standard given the genre. Abandoned (or seemingly abandoned) colony, "one last mission" for part of or all of the crew, rumblings of some kind of superweapon based on a newly discovered technology, female crew members and sexual tension, etc., etc., etc.
While reading Frontera I was reminded of Kim Stanley Robinson's Green Mars, another book which details the workings of a Martian colony, and also Andy Weir's Artemis, which traverses similar territory. Robinson's book offers a more insightful look at what terraforming the Martian surface might involve, while Artemis is a more detailed take on how how a Martian colony might work.
This said, the two issues I had with Frontera weren't that Robinson and Weir covered similar ground more effectively, my two issues were with how the story was told.
1. Characterization
The biggest problem with this book is its characters. They're all badly drawn and their actions don't always accord with who they are. You've got a guy whose apparent goal is a suicide mission to another part of the galaxy, another guy who's only interested in advancing his corporate career at others' expense, a third guy who's inexplicably "Japanese," and an assortment of female characters who only seem to exist for the sake of sexual liaisons with the male characters. None of these characters' various motivations are explained to anyone's satisfaction, and their character arcs are far from complete. The worst example of this problem is "Curtis," the leader of the colony, who seems more a generic bad guy than an actual person. He's only present in the story to give other characters reasons for their heroic sacrifices, nothing more.
2. Narrative Structure
The story moves backwards and forwards in time, and also switches between several characters' points of view. This facet of the novel is fairly standard stuff, but most of the backward motion (i.e. the backstory) takes place in the first half of the book, making it hard to tell when a particular event is taking place. The switches between characters only exacerbates this issue, particularly with respect to "Reese" and "Kane," two characters who are extremely similar.
Layered over all of the above is a mythological discourse informed by Kane's mental conditioning. The dreams or hallucinations he experiences really needed their own chapters, if for no other reason than to minimize confusion.
Taking into account the problems with characterization, narrative structure and Kane's personal mythology discussed here, truly addressing all of Frontera's issues should have resulted in a book twice as long. This hypothetical Frontera would have been, I think, a much stronger story, full of interesting twists and turns. But apparently no one at Baen Enterprises, the book's publisher, saw it this way, and the result is a novel I struggled to finish from the very first chapter.
This isn't to say, however, that I think Lewis Shiner is a bad writer. Despite its glaring flaws, there are a couple interesting passages in Frontera, even if these passages, like everything else in the book, could have been expanded upon further.
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