Title:
The Ganymede Club
Author:
Charles Sheffield (1935-2002)
Publisher:
Tor Books, 1995
ISBN
0-812-54460-9

How do you tell a science fiction mystery? Well, you let it take place in a science fiction setting, of course. Sheffield is a competent story teller, and this mystery has a brisk pace that pulls the reader right along. Many mystery authors don't do this well.

The story's main characters make it difficult to hang on a particular peg. There's a young woman, who has a very mature relationship with a male acquaintance. In turn, she has a young brother, a computer geek, who himself has a computer geek friend created with all the necessary stereo typical features. The boy seems intended to appeal to younger readers, but the older sister's relationship is hardly the kind you'd expect to find in a juvenile story.

The fact that Sheffield draws these characters with loving detail makes them more of a problem than they might be otherwise. Flat, cartoonish caricatures can be ignored, but these people are interesting and alive. So when the sister seems to lose consistency towards the end of the story it is much more jarring than it would be otherwise. I found the transformation more unbelievable than if Sheffield had asserted that she grew wings!

One of the story's most compelling features is the notion of an interplanetary war that ends up destroying most of the Earth's population. Normally, when I find such a plot device, it is central to the story. In this case it is a peripheral piece of history. For all its horror it touches the story only lightly; even the main characters who ostensibly were strongly affected by the war, escaping just ahead of annihilation, seem to be almost untouched.

Sheffield's story has a curiously unfinished feel, once these features are all considered. There are details that are brought into the light, leading the reader to expect them to be important later on. The main characters keep crossing the line from young adult to miracle child, and back. In the end, events are pushed towards an unsatisfactory, and altogether much too neat, ending. In spite of these flaws I did enjoy the story.