Review of Ten Low by Stark Holborn

In our metamodern science fiction of today, anything goes. There is no Golden Age, Silver Age, New Wave, Cyberpunk, whatever. The writer is free to pick from anything, combine anything, and strike out in any direction in an effort to make a sale. Looking to go space western with a relatable character is Stark Holborn's Ten Low (2021).

Ten Low is the story of Ten Low. Ha. A wanted ex-con, she is wandering the desert of a frontier planet to avoid bounty hunters when the book kicks off. Coming over a rise in the dunes she encounters a crashed space ship. A young woman who claims to be an army general is the lone survivor, and Ten puts her medical talents to use helping her. The pair travel to a nearby desert town and part ways—or so they think. Ten Low's rescue triggering a series of events, bounty hunters become the least of her problems.

If there is a science fiction horde, then Ten Low is square in the middle of it. The prose is not bad and not good. It is. There is nothing edgy to the story. It happens. There are no flashy turns of phrase, nothing to lure the reader in with diction. It goes. Pace and plotting are steady and methodical—things happening in a steady undulation of peaks and valleys. Calm, action, calm, action, just as you would expect them to. It reads. And the main character is... Just is. She has some details to give her realism—to tell she's alive and behaving and reacting as a person would. But not enough to say she's somebody the reader knows or possesses enough nuance to proverbially reach out and touch.

Reading Ten Low, there was a metaphor that kept crossing my mind: the story has a good coat of primer but is still waiting for the final coat of paint to make things shine. As stated in the intro of this review, it's clear throughout what Holborn is aiming for: fun space western with a relatable main character. To be clear, these boxes are checked. Only, things remains too generic to check them with flourish. Holborn didn't put in the extra mile to give the story a coat of paint that makes it truly standout. It feels like so many stories today: workshopped by peers to the point of mediocrity. William Gibson telling this story would make it shine—to give it that extra degree of detail it needs to etch itself in the reader's mind, line by line, page by page. I understand it is unfair to say this, to say Holborn should write like Gibson to git gud. No, I'm only saying there are other writers have a knack for giving their tales a spark that gets them from serviceable to wholly engaging, page after page.

In the end, Ten Low is a solid physiognomy of a novel, but is missing the mole on the clavicle, blonde cheek fuzz, and the slightly crooked front tooth—the little details that make a body palpable. Plot points flow, the setting has potential, and there is an interesting main character lurking somewhere. Trouble is, the setting needs more granular exposition to make the story pop—to fully realize the potential of a space western. And the main character, for as interesting as her backstory is, isn't as engaging in the present. Like the image on the cover, she doesn't have an identity. She spends most of the novel caught up in the machinations of others, and shows limited agency beyond fight and flight. There is a decent novel here for readers looking for space western, just seems there could have been more. (For contrasting idiosyncrasy, see Nathan Ballingrud's space westernThe Strange.)