Subject: Review of William Lovejoy's "Black Sky"

From: [email-masked] (David M. Chess)
Date: 16 Oct 93 00:26:23 GMT

Note : This review gives away the identity of the Bad Guys, but so
       does the back cover of the book!  So it must not be a secret...

Executive summary : Run-of-the-mill military techno-thriller, interesting
   only as a datapoint in the evolution of Consensus Reality in the West
   (due to the identities of the Good Guys and the Bad Guys).

Setting : North America, a bit of the Kazakh outback, and the skies
   over North America, Europe, and a bit of Asia.  Near future (well,
   actually near past, as there's still a Soviet Union: the book was
   written 1990ish).

Premise : Our hero is your typical maverick test pilot, leader
   of the American squadron of a semi-secret joint US-Soviet
   project developing sub-orbital jet/rocket planes for no
   apparent reason.  While on a test run observing a satellite
   launch, he sees something that leads the Good Guys to discover
   that Someone Else also has a sub-orbital program, and They are
   using their craft to shoot down various objects that people
   are trying to launch into space (until now, no one's suspected
   that the sudden rash of launch-failures wasn't just bad luck).

Characterization : Hehe.  The people are all just as you'd expect;
   the Maverick but Indispensable Test Pilot, the Communist but
   Good-hearted Soviet pilot whose superiors pressure him to do
   some spying while he's in the states, various congresspeople
   who the poor military-types have to waste time dealing with
   when they could be flying neat planes or blowing things up,
   and so on.  Our hero *is* a sensitive guy, though, and one
   of the women he takes to bed is in fact his girlfriend.  You
   can tell because he knows her last name, and he *remembers
   to call her* once, at the very end of the book.  I was
   deeply moved.  (This is a cheap shot that I couldn't resist;
   Lovejoy in fact does a workmanlike job with the stereotypes,
   although he makes no attempt to go beyond them.)

Story : The Good Guys figure out how to arm their suborbitals in
   record time, go up and shoot down the bad guys, blow up the
   Bad Guys' home base for good measure, and our hero goes to
   bed with various females.  The only Good Guys who get shot
   down are minor characters you never really met.  You know.

   The interesting fact is that the bad guys turn out to be
   some Japanese.  Not the Japanese government, mind, but a
   Japanese corporation.  This corporation launches things into
   space for money, and they've been shooting down other
   people's launch vehicles so that people with things they
   want to put into space will come to them for the service.
   This is wildly implausible in retrospect, although it's
   done so bare-faced that I didn't notice it at the time.

   During the Cold War, of course, the Bad Guys would probably
   have been the Soviet government.  In this book, the Soviets
   are pictured as somewhat bumbling, somewhat pathetic, not
   entirely trustworthy, but good guys once you get to know
   them away from the stumbling bureaucracy, and on Our Side.
   The bad guys are Japanese businessmen.  And the subtext is
   that international business is just like an arms race, and
   you can "win" by being better at blowing things up than
   anyone else.  Sort of sad, really.

Science : Probably quite accurate.  Despite the romantic title,
   we never really get a *feel* for what it's like to fly way
   up where the sky's black.  The sub-orbitals are all heavily
   stealthed, and the only way for one to detect another reliably
   is via infrared.  The good guys equip their ships and missles
   with infrared detectors, and the bad guys don't.  So the
   good guys win.

   The sub-orbitals themselves sound Way Cool.  I'll take two
   or three for my Stronghold Somewhere in the Carpathians,
   thank you.  We can put them in the old hangar next to the
   submarine docks, where Igor's been stashing the drums
   of toxic waste.

Recommendation: Unless you're an avid reader of ordinary military
   techno-thrillers, there's no particular reason to get this.
   Even if you *are* an avid etc, you may have a hard time finding
   it.

%A Lovejoy, William
%T Black Sky
%I Kensington Pub.; Zebra Books
%C New York
%D 1990
%G ISBN 0-8217-3236-6
%P 384 pp.
%O paperback, US$4.50

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David M. Chess                    \      Nothing moves;
High Integrity Computing Lab      \         where would it go?
IBM Watson Research               \