Steal Across the Sky by Nancy Kress

The Barnes & Noble Review

This volume from the prolific, award-winning science fiction author Nancy Kress bombards the reader with big ideas aplenty -- but only a genre-addled birdbrain would pigeonhole Kress as yet another concept-slinging roughneck kicking around speculative turf. Her casually viscous prose smolders with a smooth, page-turning magma flow, unearthing persecuted individuals who live without sleep, bloodthirsty dogs, and morbid murders of bioengineered ballerinas. But all this imaginative bedrock gives way to deeper questions lurking beneath the tough crust of her stories. Kress mishmashes mystery with morality but never entirely drops her poker face, avoiding the literal-minded devil that lesser authors hide in too many details.

Steal Across the Sky borrows some ideas that Kress explored in her previous novel, Probability Moon. A team of diplomats is once again sent to another world with limited instructions. The difference here is that Steal's stout adventurers are young and lack expert qualifications -- something that the careful reader will catch onto long before the team itself does -- and that, where the prior novel's characters employed telepathy, the parallel talent here involves communicating with the dead. Instead of the "Reality and Atonement" governmental branch, we're given an unseen alien race named the Atoners. The Atoners do not stroke white cats in latent lunar lairs, nor do they appear especially interested in epistolary blackmail, but they do hope to correct a mistake they made 10,000 years ago through a very unusual agreement.

The pact is this: 21 volunteers -- referred to as Witnesses -- must visit seven planets and stick around until they have "witnessed something that needs witnessing." This quest for the enigmatic smoking gun is presented through chapters containing close third-person perspectives, each devoted to individual characters, as if to suggest that humanity remains afflicted by superficial and solipsistic impulses. Additional chapters are dedicated to satirical ephemera reminiscent of an Eric Kraft novel -- a New Yorker cartoon, a crossword puzzle, even a Writer's Digest article -- all referencing how the media tracks ongoing developments in unhelpful ways. We learn through these quite funny interstitials that, while the U.S. president is a woman and eBay is still around, Oprah continues to ask irrelevant questions of her guests in 2020. (Whether her book club still exists is anyone's guess.)

The great joke here is that, on the cusp of a major cultural awakening, humanity remains ensnared by fickle celebrity culture, youthful entitlement, and a media system that would rather distort than discover. As evidenced by the Why Wait? Society, the current impatience for immediate results has escalated. Dare to introduce a concept like the "second road" -- initially described as "a belief in an afterlife, probably the single largest aberration of the human mind" -- and deadlier instincts burst to the surface.

So perhaps the perceptions of these amateur Witnesses are just as "savage" as the presumed primitives on Kular A, one of the planets where our heavily protected heroes touch down. But in her character accounts, Kress doesn't provide us with too many specifics. We know more about plants mating in a royal courtyard than we do about the Kularian natives. We learn that the Kularian men each have one red-painted tooth and that most of them wear red skirts. And although it isn't overtly stated, we get the sense that they are humanoid, but they kill children, engage in pedophiliac relationships, maintain a slave system, and participate in kulith -- a deadly game reminiscent of those outlined in Iain M. Banks's Player of Games.

But this sketchiness is deliberate, for the Witnesses' perspectives are often compromised by an integral short-sightedness. One's senses may depart, just as they do for a widower named Lucca, who loses his smell and his sight while waiting on the planet for further instructions. And perhaps this myopia extends into the ideological. Colonialism and racism are suggested when a Kularian clings to one Witness's back "like a humiliated monkey." One Kularian's eyes are compared to "muted stars in an evening sky," but the appropriately named and certainly not okay Cam O'Kane sees only "the bleakest things she had ever seen" through her telephoto vantage point. Upon returning to Earth, Cam becomes a media starlet, muted and childlike in insight but constantly giving interviews and working with a shy secretary who is "two years older than her but seemed to Cam like a child." The media-industrial complex is so imposing that another lonely witness named Soledad is forced to undergo plastic surgery to evade reporters.

A government contact named Jim Thompson suggests Kress's commitment to tough pulp subplots. And the novel's brisk six-sided atmosphere often rolls out a number of dicey operators, such as the decidedly nonathletic Carl Lewis, a freelance journalist who offers to lay down a remarkably hefty cash sum for an exclusive interview with one of the Witnesses, and James Hinton, a seemingly debonair stranger who helps Soledad evade the press. Not only does Kress have her characters address these implausibilities with natural suspicion, but she also introduces a Catholic character named Frank to remind us that accepting a changing world is often a question of faith. This is a faith that the reader must likewise have, for the novel's many twists and turns often causes one to wonder precisely where Kress is heading.

Because the author spends so much of her time cross-stitching together these threads, her prose is often pulpish and workmanlike. Repeated references to Lucca's vineyards grow tedious. As Cam attempts to understand the violence on Kular A, she's compared to "an unbroken animal that ran blindly around a room, knocking over furniture and slamming into walls." During a cross-country rush, a car radio plays "a succession of country-and-western stations, each swelling, sustained, and then fading out, like flowers. Or lives." When Soledad thinks of her mystery man, Kress writes, "She was a receiver tuned to one frequency: James. James. James."

Such sentences may seem ponderous even within the hard flow of melodrama. But it all seems to work in Kress's hands -- perhaps because the rompish tone sustains the illusion that the reader is enjoying a pedestrian thriller. It's fitting that Kress doesn't answer all the questions she raises. Like the tales collected by Sabine Baring-Gould, her novel offers something in the nature of a curious myth for our present age. --Edward Champion

Edward Champion is a Brooklyn-based writer. His work has appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, The Los Angeles Times, and other distinguished and disreputable publications. He runs the cultural web site http://www.edrants.com.

From the Publisher

The aliens appeared one day, built a base on the moon, and put an ad on the internet:

“We are an alien race you may call the Atoners. Ten thousand years ago we wronged humanity profoundly. We cannot undo what has been done, but we wish humanity to understand it. Therefore we request twenty-one volunteers to visit seven planets to Witness for us. We will convey each volunteer there and back in complete safety. Volunteers must speak English. Send requests for electronic applications to witness@Atoners.com."

At first, everyone thought it was a joke. But it wasn’t.

This is the story of three of those volunteers, and what they found on Kular A and Kular B.

Publishers Weekly

Nebula and Hugo-winner Kress (Dogs) presents a fascinating mystery in classic SF style. The alien Atoners come to Earth with a startling message: some 10,000 years ago, they committed a crime against humanity, kidnapping human beings and establishing colonies on 14 other planets. Now they are asking for 21 human Witnesses to travel to those distant worlds and uncover the nature of their crime. Cam, Lucca and Soledad head to the double planets of Kular A and Kular B, worlds where life is cheap but may not end at the moment of death. The knowledge that they bring back changes civilization dramatically. Though the novel is somewhat marred by an over-hasty conclusion that leaves a number of plot threads dangling, Kress's philosophical explorations will keep readers hooked and thoughtful. (Feb.)

Jackie Cassada - Library Journal

Aliens calling themselves the Atoners have confessed to committing crimes against the human race thousands of years ago and have recruited a few individuals to travel to select worlds to "Witness" what they have done. Kress (Stinger) once again demonstrates her absolute mastery of alien-human encounters, fleshing out her characters as believable individuals while at the same time managing surprising plot twists and philosophical conundrums at every turn. For most libraries.

Kirkus Reviews

Kress (Dogs, 2008, etc.) returns to science fiction with this yarn about alien contact, genetic engineering and life after death. In the near future, aliens arrive on the moon and announce that they must make amends for a grave injustice they caused the human race 10,000 years ago. To that end, these Atoners need 21 Witnesses who will travel to seven planets seeded with human stock by the Atoners. In due course, Italian-English grad student Lucca and waitress Cam are chosen to visit Kular A and B respectively; mission controller Soledad remains in the mother ship and remotely pilots shuttles for Lucca and Cam. Cam encounters a monolithic, brutal and appallingly bloodthirsty culture where a game, Kulith-something like chess, monopoly and poker all rolled into one-determines everybody's destiny. On Lucca's planet, meanwhile-altogether a gentler, more peaceful place-evidence mounts that the people can perceive and converse with the recently dead . . . an explanation Lucca rejects. Once all the witnesses return to Earth, a compelling picture emerges: on half of the planets visited, the inhabitants can indeed see and chat with the recently dead. The Atoners explain that those inhabitants carry a gene that allows them to do so. On the other planets, and Earth, the Atoners deleted the gene. (They don't explain why.) On gene-less Earth, chaos ensues, as Kress skillfully explores the consequences of her ideas, evidently with sequels in mind. Arrestingly ambiguous and persuasively set forth-in the best science-fiction tradition, guaranteed provocative no matter what your personal opinions.

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