Gary K. Wolfe Reviews Flight & Anchor by Nicole Kornher-Stace

Flight & Anchor, Nicole Kornher-Stace (Tachy­on 978-1-61696-392-7, $16.95, 192pp, tp) June 2023.

Superbright kids on the run, sometimes from shadowy institutions and sometimes with para­normal powers, have been a staple of SF at least since van Vogt’s Slan back in 1940, although an argument could be made that Wilmar H. Shiras’s 1950 fix-up Children of the Atom traces a more direct line to comparatively recent iterations like X-Men or The Umbrella Academy. Mutations from atomic radiation may have given way to trendier technologies like cloning or genetic engineering, but the principle remains the same: most adults, especially military or corporate types, are treacherous manipulators, and the kids need to learn to trust each other in order to survive. In Nicole Kornher-Stace’s Flight & Anchor, a pre­quel to her 2021 novel Firebreak, the 12-year-old protagonists are so dehumanized that they have numbers instead of names, like in We or Stranger Things: 06 is a resourceful but rebellious girl, and 22, a more cautious and circumspect boy. But as the story begins, they might as well be Hans Chris­tian Andersen waifs, dangerously underdressed during a winter storm, until a kindly barista of­fers them shelter in her coffee shop. The barista, virtually the only secondary character in the novel, seems to offer a rare moment of human contact, but then disappears from the tale entirely. Soon the kids find a makeshift shelter in an abandoned shipping container, and for a while the tale seems a deliberate homage to the endless Boxcar Chil­dren series, and particularly the 1924 original by Gertrude Chandler Warner, which Kornher-Stace acknowledges, with some insightful comments, in an afterword. But, as readers of Firebreak will already know, this setting is light-years removed from the Norman Rockwell America of Warner’s original novel. Instead, it’s the ubercapitalist cor­porate dystopia which has replaced the United States in that earlier novel, and the kids are actu­ally wholly owned, billion-dollar superweapons of the ruthless Stellaxis Corporation in its ongoing economic and political wars. “Each can take on a fifteen-ton mech in single combat. Survive a week without water, a month without food. Hear sounds beyond a human’s range,” etc.

We learn this, mostly in fragments and allu­sions, when the point of view occasionally shifts to that of the Director, who seems to be the only officer of the corporation to realize that their high-profile assets have gone on the lam, and who is frantically trying to get them back before her bosses find out. But even though she can track them and even monitor their vital signs, simply abducting them would be bad optics, not to mention hazardous. Instead, she enlists the aid of an ancient AI space probe called SABRINA, which takes the form of a shapeshifting nanobot array (and which is apparently borrowed from Kornher-Stace’s middle-grade novel Jillian vs. Parasite Planet). SABRINA effectively becomes the novel’s fourth character, and its delightfully independent voice is something of a reprieve from the grim determination of the Director and the claustrophobic feeling of the kids in their makeshift bunker, even though its plot function and sometimes its appearance suggest a sort of nanobot Tinker Bell.

Much narrower in scope than Firebreak, Flight & Anchor feels almost stripped down to essentials, mostly confined to the points of view of its three main characters and only occasionally offering glimpses of a wider world, such as that coffee shop or a Comforts of Home megastore that the kids visit for supplies. At times, Kornher-Stace seems so bent on narrative efficiency that she re­sorts to using bullet points or numbered lists that read like Post-it notes, not all of which add to the plot. There’s little direct evidence of the oppressive dystopian setting of the earlier novel, and in fact it’s reasonable to ask how much of a standalone tale this one actually is. At the archetypal level of bright kids on the run from an evil corpora­tion – that tradition I mentioned earlier – it’s a well-realized adventure with likeable protagonists. But only a few chapters in, a few pointed allusions to the future begin to show up – the Director misjudging 22 “chronically thus far, fatally a few years hence”; or “The thought that will return to the Director unbidden, eight years down the line, standing in an elevator with minutes to live” – strongly suggest that reading Firebreak might well explain some apparent loose ends in Flight & Anchor, including its ending. Indeed that is the case, and the earlier novel does fill in some gaps and clarify some allusions. With its emphasis on gaming and stark corporate greed, Firebreak is a very different sort of novel, but if it’s not quite a prerequisite to understanding the dynamics at work in Flight & Anchor, it adds considerable depth and texture to what otherwise is simply a pretty good iteration of a pretty old trope.

This review and more like it in the June 2023 issue of Locus.

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