Mixon, Laura J. [published as M. J. Locke]. Up Against It. Tor, 2011.
Published in March 2011, Up Against it had the misfortune of coming out three months before Leviathan Wakes, the first volume of James S. A. Corey’s Expanse series. Both books deal with bioengineering and asteroid mining in a solar system in which Mars, the asteroid belt, and Earth are locked in a three-way power struggle. Leviathan made all similar books look like imitations, even if they were published first. In a more just world, Mixon’s book would have gotten more attention. It is a solid coming of age story. Geoff, a young man living in an asteroid mining community whose economy depends on finding rocks with substantial amounts of water, is good with genetic engineering and nanotechnology. He is also good at doing the open-space equivalent of bicycle racing. When his older brother is killed, Geoff, his buddies, and Jane, a resource commissioner, begin to investigate. A second plot thread involves the accidental creation of an unprogrammed sapient AI, which is one of the known dangers of nanotechnology. Such an AI is called a feral. They are dangerous and must be destroyed before they do irreversible harm to the computer system the asteroid depends on. Part of the story is told from the point of view of the feral, which in its own clumsy way has discovered that humans are also sapient. All the characters except the villains are well drawn. The world-building is impressively detailed. Mixon makes good use of her experience as a chemical engineer working on creating sustainable environments. Unfortunately, there has been no follow-up novel from Mixon, who seems to have quit publishing. 4 stars. ( )

A society of people living in the asteroid belt has managed to mostly free themselves from control by earth. Earth is a dying planet which needs the materials the Belt can provide. The story concerns a growing artificial intelligence in the Belt's computer systems. The AI is aware but doesn't know that it is controlling the environment of a society of humans. In fact, it doesn't know anything outside of itself at first. The humans, threatened by the AI, seek to destroy it. Based on the ending, I strongly suspect a sequel. ( )

Geoff and his friends on the asteroid Phocaea, just graduated from school, pull of an epic technical hack. They successfully dodge the omnipresent camera remotes of "Stroiders, a reality show broadcasting the lives of the Phocaeans to the entire system. It's a triumph.

It's quickly followed by someone's shocking act of sabotage that kills Geoff's brother, wtih Geoff and his friends, as well as Carl's boss, arriving too late to save him.

And even that is just the start.

The sabotage that kills Carl starts a meltdown of a delivery of much-needed water and methane ice, vital not just to the colony's economy but its survival.

Jane, the colony's resource director, has a major disaster on her hands.

It's also a political crisis. The sabotage might be part of a plot by that Martian mafia to engineer a takeover of Phocaea. Jane has to juggle resources, technical issues, and politics to attempt to avert either mass death, or political takeover by the mob.

The worldbuilding is well thought out, and the characters are interestingly complex. The plot moves along, and is nicely intricate.

But what really hooked me on this one is that it has the feel of The Good Old Stuff, without the 1950s social dynamics. Gender equality and racial/ethnic equality are taken for granted. (Well, standard human ethnic/racial equality. This future sill has its issues. What Locke has done with the Viridians is really interesting.)

It's a great read or listen, and I look forward to more from Locke.

Recommended.

I bought this audiobook. ( )

This is a good old fashioned science fiction story. One of the plot threads is about four spunky teenagers, which reminded me of stories like the Hardy Boys or Tom Corbett Space Cadet. Other parts are like the pulp sci-fi stories from the 1940s-1960s — except with several female characters in starring roles. I admit, 'Up Against It' did not grab me at first. I started reading it last year and put it aside unfinished after about 60 pages. I picked it up again this week and found I gave up about 20 pages too soon. It's not great science fiction that offers much new in the way of insightful speculation about the future of humanity, but it is a serviceable story about a society on an asteroid trying to remain independent from powerful and corrupt outside forces that dominate Earth and Mars. There's some politics, interplanetary mobsters, and am emerging AI. I liked it. ( )

There was a lot of potential here, and there were parts of the book that I definitely enjoyed, but overall this was a huge disappointment.

The book takes place on an asteroid in our solar system. A bunch of bad stuff happens taht endangers the lives of everyone on the asteroid, and the people investigating it find out that it is all a conspiracy by a mob from Mars. Meanwhile, the artificial intelligence in the computers that run the asteroid becomes self-aware. That's a terrible summary of the plot, but the plot is ridiculously complicated.

So why didn't I like it? For one thing, the book was about twice as long as it should have been. Huge portions of the book follow Jane Navio, the asteroid's Resource Commissioner, as she does her job. These scenes are boring: she goes to meetings, she does research, she gives orders, she thinks about her family. Her character isn't very interesting. The scenes with her were really tedious.

Locke has come up with a very complicated world, and has clearly created the world in great detail. However, I found the technical explanations to be very confusing, and I never did manage to picture a lot of the technology in the book. For instance, although it was described in great detail, I never really understood how the city inside the asteroid is put together. Some things are described in great detail, but some other things aren't described at all. For instance, some of the main characters ride bikes through space. These bikes are never really described, so I just pictured motorcycles. In space. Yeah.... Also, there are lots of bots, which play a really pivotal role in the climax, but these bots are never described at all. We don't know their size, shape, color, anything about them. So I pictured Wall-E. Actually, scale was a big problem for me throughout the book - everything seemed to be the wrong size.

Four of the main characters are teenagers. These teenagers just so happen to be in the right place at the right time every time something major happens, and they just so happen to save the day 3 times in the book. So in the middle of this very serious space opera, we suddenly have the Hardy Boys. It is just so implausible that these teenagers would be involved in all of the major events, and save the day every time.

So all in all, not the best use of my time. ( )