Book Review: The Oxygen Barons

Book Review: 'The Oxygen Barons' by Gregory Feeley 

2 / 5 Stars

‘The Oxygen Barons” (264 pp., Ace Books, July 1990; cover art by Dave Archer) is one of the last books in the Ace ‘Science Fiction Specials Series 3,’ which was edited by Terry Carr. Following Carr’s demise in 1987, Damon Knight took over the editing duties. It is unclear whether Carr or Knight was responsible for handling this novel.

‘Barons’ is set several centuries in the future, at which time the bodies of the inner Solar System have been colonized or exploited for raw materials, which are delivered via mass drivers from one outpost to another. 

The Moon has been terraformed and possesses a stable, breathable atmosphere and a network of rivers and large bodies of water. Its government is divided between two feuding factions, the Nearside and the Farside. These polities loosely are confederated with a variety of offworld corporations and trading blocs, who are competing for power among themselves. A particular bone of contention is the extravagant amount of oxygen needed to sustain the operation of the Moon. Some of the offworld corporations are lobbying to divert this oxygen for use in sustaining other colonies elsewhere in the system.

As the novel opens, a Nearside engineer named Galvanix is attempting to prevent an opposing faction from driving an asteroid into the Moon, a decidedly unfriendly action. He finds unexpected assistance in his task from Beryl Taggart, a cybernetically enhanced super-soldier. The first half of the book is one extended chase sequence, as Taggart and Galvanix find themselves stranded on the Farside, fleeing hostile authorities in an effort to retrieve an important database.

The novel then moves to a large space station orbiting the Earth, and from there, to the Earth itself and an entire floating city anchored off the coast of India, as the various entities referred to as the ‘Oxygen Barons’ engage a series of maneuvers designed to bring a hapless Galvanix under their control.

‘Barons’ does have its positives; every few pages another ‘gee whiz’ moment rears its head, and the physics of living and working in low-gravity environments accurately are represented. 

 

But overall the novel is a labored read, and needed better editing. Feeley’s prose is very dense and overly descriptive. For example, in one segment of the narrative, Galvanix has to ascend a narrow shaft embedded belowground in a lunar installation. Most authors would deal with this segment within several paragraphs, perhaps, but Feeley spends nearly two pages on the event, turning it into a sort of prolonged mini-epic. The novel is clogged with too many of these instances of over-writing.

The backstory involving the political and economic conflict surrounding the Moon never is adequately communicated to the reader. Indeed, whatever plot underlies the events in the narrative is so poorly outlined that I finished the book with no real idea of why Galvanix was such a pursued character in the first place. 

Things aren’t helped by the author’s tendency to use some of the more stilted dialogue I’ve encountered in a recent hard SF novel:

Beryl answered these questions with alacrity. “Cognitive modification is negligible, since it cannot be accomplished without jeopardizing sophic integrity. If your memories and expertise were readily separable from your sense of self, they would have been decanted alone.”

A steady diet of such awkward phrasing tends to wear on the reader, and makes ‘Barons’ a too-hard slog. I only can recommend this novel to those readers with a particular affectation for hard science fiction narratives.