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Probe

After enjoying a couple of Lerner's recent stories in the pages of Analog, I chanced upon a copy of his one novel, published a decade ago, and decided to check it out. Unfortunately, a warning flag should have gone up when the cover blurb stated that Probe is "in the tradition of Michael Crichton's Sphere", as that novel is a strong contender for the worst I've ever read.

Probe isn't nearly as bad as Sphere, but Lerner's writing as exhibited in Analog has come a long way from the days when this novel was penned. Bob Hanson is the head of R&D at Asgard Aerospace Corporation, whose prime source of income, Prospector, is a space probe seeking exploitable resources in the asteroid belt. One day Prospector comes upon what appears to be a damaged alien spaceship in its vicinity. Hanson puts his career on the line to divert Prospector to examine it, but the alien ship explodes and apparently takes Prospector with it. Hanson quickly gets caught between a conspiracy of his superiors at Asgard trying to take credit for whatever good comes out of Prospector's exploration, and a mysterious cabal which seems to have taken over Asgard and sees Hanson as a renegade who must be dealt with swiftly and harshly.

Probe quickly becomes a "hunted man trying to clear his name" story, and in that regard actually resembles the film War Games (which it indeed resembles in some other key elements of its plot). However, the story always feels a little too whimsical, too much like a movie adventure, to really make this format work as a novel. The writing style also feels dated, with the too-easy humor of the dialogue, and the sometimes-embarrassing attitudes of the men towards the women. (It takes a deft hand to make that sort of mild sexism work; I'm pretty sure you have to be famous or dead, or maybe just be Robert A. Heinlein, who happens to be both.) And the plot felt a little too transparent to me, both in its romantic developments and in the big secret behind the mysterious cabal. I figured it out scores of pages ahead of time.

So Probe was a disappointment to me. On the other hand, it in no way detracts from my enjoyment of Lerner's current, shorter published work. Practice makes perfect, as they say, and if writing this novel was a necessary step on the way to his contemporary fiction, then it was time well spent.