The novel “The Scarab Mission” by James L. Cambias was published for the first time in 2023. It’s the second book in The Billion Worlds series.
The starship Yanai has a contract to send the abandoned Safdaghar habitat into a new orbit where its new owners can recycle its components. There’s a small crew on board, and Solana leads the others into the habitat in search of valuable objects.
The team has a few days to explore the habitat, where artists lived and created unique objects that could be of considerable value to collectors. The situation they find there, with dead bodies and vast damage, indicates that something very bad happened. The arrival of another team in search of something valuable further complicates the situation.
A human, a cyborg, a corvid, and a dinosaur walk into a habitat. It may seem like the beginning of a joke, but it’s only a small representation of the variety of biological intelligences in the The Billion Worlds’ fictional universe. These are habitats scattered throughout the solar system that in the 10th millennium are inhabited by both biological and artificial intelligences.
The plot based on a group of people who walk into a place that’s supposed to be abandoned is old, to say the least. James L. Cambias uses it to explore some dark sides of the fictional universe he created. The technologies that exist in that future are very advanced but this doesn’t match social progress: on the contrary, it seems that little has changed from that point over the millennia. The strongest example, central to this novel, shows how in that future there are very advanced genetic techniques that led to a great variety of biological sentient beings but also to the creation of perfect slaves.
The dark tones begin already with the first exploration by the team that arrive on the starship Yanai because the Safdaghar habitat seems like a place where a war was fought. It’s not the best situation to find valuable objects that aren’t necessarily material goods: one hope is to find the last poem written by Pasquin Tiu, a famous Martian poet who was forced to flee from the assassins of the Deimos regime. Again, James L. Cambias uses a plot element to show a dark side of that future, this time showing the existence of various dictatorships.
There are several occasions in which the plot ends up being an excuse or little more to explore the characters’ past and connections with the societies of some habitat. Various characters have their secrets and their development also passes through their revelation. In the case of the cyborg Utsuro, his purpose is precisely to discover his past because he only knows that something happened to him on Safdaghar that almost killed him causing him to lose his memory.
Sometimes the horror tones that become increasingly important seemed to me to be the novel’s flaw rather than a way to increase the tension. That’s because it’s a type of situation in which the characters tend to be driven by panic and act irrationally even if in this case, they’re supposed to be smart. An antagonist who is a total psychopath to the point of confusing her delusions for reality doesn’t help. In the end, flashbacks and personal stories of the protagonists end up being more interesting than the main plot.
I found “The Scarab Mission” decidedly imperfect but readers who appreciate certain horror movies will have no difficulty in overlooking what I consider to be flaws. Otherwise, I had a far better impression of the scenarios connected to the many habitats even if I always find the idea of a future in which humans continue to behave like stupid apes sad. This is the second novel in a series but the story is separate from that of “The Godel Operation” and completely autonomous. I recommend it in particular to readers who appreciate dramatic stories with dystopian elements. It’s available on Amazon USA, UK, and Canada.
