Review: Unexploded Remnants

Unexploded Remnants by Elaine Gallagher
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This 109-page novella is stuffed full of enough ideas for a full-length novel. The author has published non-fiction reviews and articles and even wrote and produced a short film, but this is apparently their first professional fiction publication. As such, I can certainly understand the impulse to throw out nearly every idea they've ever had, as they are probably worried about whether the book will sell enough for them to be able to publish again.

I understand it, but as a reader I felt a bit cheated. There is so much going on here, and because of the novella length restraints, we have no time to sit and absorb what we're being told. The characters also have neither space or time to react to what is happening to them--they must run at breakneck speed to the next plot point. The worldbuilding particularly suffers in this: there are many questions that could be asked about the wormhole gate network that provides travel throughout the galaxy. Particularly the basic questions of who, how and why? As well as when, considering there is a secret wormhole gate hidden in a Stonehenge-like structure (which has somewhat unpleasant callbacks to that hoary old bestseller of the 70's, Chariots of the Gods?)? These wormhole gates take our protagonist Alice on a rapid-fire planet-hopping journey that shows us many different living and dead civilizations, laying down what could have been a fascinating tapestry of a galaxy that has had countless sapient beings and many star-spanning civilizations rise and fall over the years. Many interesting worlds are whisked by in rapid succession as Alice jumps from planet to planet to evade her pursuers, and several times I wished for a plot-relevant reason to slow the pace of travel down, so we the reader could have a chance to really see some of the alien weirdness Alice is passing through.

Not the least of this book's many revelations is the fact that Alice is the last surviving human: her story begins in Oxford in 1967, when Alice, a trans person then going by the name of Andrew, falls down the rabbit hole of the ancient wormhole network and is transported to the Archive, the galaxy's central repository for archaeogical and cultural artifacts. She is made an Archive agent and sent back to Earth to attempt to save humanity from their self-destructive streak. but humans succeeded in destroying themselves anyway. Alice was evacuated before the final war and has spent the hundreds of years since (this world's clone and transplant technology means she is functionally immortal) traveling the galaxy and bringing her finds to the Archive.

The "unexploded remnant" of this story is an ancient war machine, a person downloaded into a cylinder and made into a weapon. Gunn, as Alice names him, is hunted by many different parties who want to exploit him for their own purposes. Alice is looking for his home base to possibly extract him from the weapon and give him a body again. The pursuit of Alice and Gunn takes up the entire story, although the climax involves Gunn, grief-stricken by the loss of his family centuries earlier (the time dilation effects of gate travel mean it's only been sixteen days for him) and trying to restart the war he fought so long ago. At the story's climax, Alice manages to talk him into standing down.

Unfortunately, this book really needed a greater length to explore everything the author threw out there, and since it didn't get it, the story feels somewhat shallow as a result. For instance, we never know how Alice feels about being the last surviving human being in the galaxy, and what she does to cope with the loss of her planet and her entire people. She's probably deeply traumatized, and you'd think something like that would be a major plot point, wouldn't you? Like so many other things in this book, it's glossed over. The depiction of the wider galaxy with its many aliens and alien civilizations is also barely touched upon. Again, I realize you didn't have any time for that within the constraints of the novella format. Which is why this book needed to be longer.

As it is, it's more than a little frustrating to read. Hopefully, if the author gets another crack at publication, they will slow down and pick out just a few ideas to explore rather than hauling out the kitchen sink. I think we could have gotten a more interesting story as a result.

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