Disavowed by John E. Stith: Review by Paul Di Filippo

Disavowed, John E. Stith (Experimenter Publishing Company 979-8888315439, trade paperback, 510pp, $16.99) December 2024

I am extremely happy to see that John Stith’s career is experiencing something like a renaissance. His novel, Reckoning Infinity, the last in a continuous flow of fine books, appeared from Tor in 1997. We did not see another until Pushback in 2018—and that one was non-SF. Twenty-one years constituted a long gap for those of us who found his earlier work gripping and well crafted, and longed for more. I recall being knocked out of my seat by his Manhattan Transfer, which basically took the doings of Superman’s Brainiac and his city-capturing ship and rationalized and reified them, along with a jet-propelled plot.

I am even happier to report that his newest novel lives up to his old standards, with no diminishment of sense of wonder, suspense, or thrills. It’s conducted on a smaller scale than some of his earlier work, but still manages to get the reader’s pulse revving.

In an unspecified far future, the Web of Worlds is a polity that encompasses innumerable solar systems and many races, including humans. And as such, they also possess a lumbering bureaucracy. Pay attention to this factor, for it’s the pivot of the plot engine.

Our narrator in this adventure is Nick Sparrow, ship’s surgeon on board the Star Storm, which is a military vessel of intermediate power. (The opening chapter gives us an illustration of Nick’s “Competent Man” qualities, as he defuses a potentially lethal crew feud.) On one certain average day, the ship receives its latest orders: visit the star system Aretta, which is acting aggressively against its neighbors, and blast a few vital communications satellites out of orbit to teach it a lesson. So off the ship goes. One important codicil here: there is no such thing as instantaneous FTL communication. Message drones can proceed no faster than a ship. Thus the Star Storm is effectively isolated from immediate recall.

There’s only one trouble with these orders. The Star Storm has been directed to the wrong destination. The overworked Rear Admiral Mikal Wendo meant to order them to Arête. Instead, he confusedly picked the sound-alike and lookalike name “Aretta,” an innocent world.

The Aretta system is charted, but otherwise unexplored, a totally unknown quantity—and soon it will become a deadly adversary.

The Star Storm arrives, blasts those satellites—and in turn is surprisingly blasted to atoms itself. Only Nick escapes in an emergency pod. Wait a minute! “Only” Nick? Well, Nick has a military-grade artificial intelligence embedded in his brain. She calls herself Natalie, and is perhaps the real star of the novel, given her sassy functionality

After a rough landing, Nick—with Natalie—realizes he has been detected and will be hunted. He can’t just turn himself in to the justifiably aggrieved natives—the Reffens—for fear of being instantly killed. He has to find a hiding place. But where?

Here’s where Stith layers his first sensawunda novum onto what appeared at first to be a simple tale of botched First Contact. In a purely believable and logical manner, Nick, looking for a hiding place, stumbles into a sophisticated underground techno-warren seemingly abandoned for centuries. He does not discover its nature until he comes into contact with two natives.

Interspersed with these space events, Stith has already introduced us to Pemmy and Glot, two Reffen young adults. Pemmy, the female, is the more cautious and logical, while Glot is all male swagger and devil-may-careness. We get a great sense of their alien natures and appearance:

[F]rom here they looked more like short-snouted wolves than any other lifeform. But they wore clothing and sported small packs atop their backs. Metallic glints from their forearms suggested weapons or communication gear.

Complications and misunderstandings in the native pursuit result in these two Reffen suddenly sharing Nick’s hiding place. Natalie cobbles together a Reffen vocabulary and acts as translator. They get acquainted and friendly. The three beings now find themselves allied—and up against the whole planet. They have several goals: survive, steal a starship, and return to Hawking, HQ of the Web of Worlds.

The step-by-step process by which they accomplish this is laid out by Stith in such verisimilitudinous yet surprising detail—rather like the way our hero survives in The Martian—that we are carried along willingly and eagerly. The mystery of the abandoned network of subterranean lairs is explicated, as is the species origin of the Reffen (shoutout to David Brin!). Little by little, our protagonists inch toward their goal. But what Stith is slyly holding back is that even if Nick returns to Hawking, he still has to face the selfishly malign ire of the man who caused their mistaken assignment.

Stith is a master of dialogue and banter and humor: between Nick and Natalie; between Pemmy and Glot; and amongst all four sentients. Zippy dialogue propels much of the story with easy flow. His evocation of ancient mysteries reminds me of the thrills I got as a youngster reading Andre Norton’s Galactic Derelict. The First Contact angle is on a par with and reminiscent of Vernor Vinge’s limning of the Tines in The Children of the Sky. And it would take an Eric Frank Russell to match Stith’s antagonism against bureaucracies.

From time to time in my reviews, I have tried to adumbrate a class of writers who deliver straight-up SF adventure that nods to postmodernism and current cultural expressions while still retaining the best of the classic ways. I think this group has its origins in writers like Keith Laumer and James Schmitz, and its recent expounders in William Barton and John Barnes.

We can certainly add John Stith to this illustrious rollcall.

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