Fairly Symmetrical

It's been eleven years since Mike Resnick published Santiago: A Myth of the Far Future. The original was a galaxy-sized frontier tale, the Wild West set among the swirling spiral arms of the Milky Way. This year Resnick published the sequel, The Return of Santiago. The question is whether the author can live up to the vivid characters and style of the first book.

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Sadly, the answer is "not really". Santiago's best features were its unique characters; from the Angel to Altair of Altair to the Jolly Swagman, Father William, and the Songbird himself, each character was distinct. Characters seemed to feel real, complex emotions, and there was real growth. The depredations of the Democracy, and the life of an Inner Frontier bounty hunter, seemed fully realized.

Most of this seems to be lacking in Return. In fact, many of the characters seem to be caricatures or carbon copies of the first book's characters. Tyrannosaur Bailey seems a pale shadow of ManMountain Bates; the One-Armed Bandit holds nothing of the Angel's mesmerizing lethality. The Twins are a far cry from the creative alien menace of Altair of Altair, and the protagonist's alien-loving bodyguard is a mere shadow of Jonathan Jeremy Jacobar Stern, the alien-loving fellow in Santiago. Even the Democracy is a cardboard cutout.

Intertwined with the desultory, derivative characters is the predictable, disjointed plot. The protagonist, a petty thief, stumbles on a forgotten box containing the entirety of Black Orpheus' writings. Over a matter of days he reads the complete saga, and comes to the realization that Santiago was not a criminal, but a revolutionary. In a flash, he decides to become the successor to Black Orpheus—naming himself Dante Alighieri, or The Rhymer—and search out a successor to the long-dead Santiago. He meets up with the aforementioned bodyguard after a flat, unsatisfying escape from his home planet (in which Democracy police forces inexplicably kill a companion of his), then a woman who is described as the Inner Frontier's most successful thief—who coincidentally is Santiago's last surviving relative. Unfortunately for her, she's nowhere near as interesting a person as Virtue McKenzie was. Barely a quarter of the way through the book, Resnick has used enough deus ex machinas to populate an entire RomanGreek theatre company, but he's not done. Every time the plot seems to be settling into a comprehensible story arc, Resnick yanks out another disjointed quest to send his heroes on. Somehow, in spite of this, the story is entirely predictable—if you haven't figured out the ending within a hundred and fifty pages, you're not paying attention.

Time and again Resnick tries to evoke the size and variety of the Inner Frontier, and time and again he falls short. Santiago had a hundred times the scope and heart of this book. If you're looking for a simple science-fiction cowboy story to while away an afternoon, The Return of Santiago might be worth your while. Just don't go expecting Resnick to match the living, breathing Frontier he created eleven years ago.

This review also appears on blogcritics.org.

Updated 4/7/2003: Jenny has pointed out that the deus ex machina is a Greek concept and not much used in Roman theatre.