Tesla has a service dog because her accident left her not just with physical injuries that require advanced pain management, restrict her movement and sometimes cause her to use a walking stick, but with mental health issues linked to PTSD and survivor guilt. Tesla carries forward most of the action of the story with her husband mostly in a supporting role (partly because he spends much of the story under arrest. Non-binary gender pronouns are de rigueur and the passengers and crew are diverse in their styles and orientations. While ‘The Spare Man’ echoes the charm of a Golden-Age mystery, it has moved away from early Twentieth Century mores and expectations. The technologies used are integral to the plot and seemed plausible to me. The science and engineering in this Science Fiction novel stand up. It’s like a very large locked room mystery, complicated by mistaken identities, additional killings, a focused effort to frame Shal and the belligerent intransigence of the aggressive, self-confident and mostly incompetent Head of Security. The plot of the murder mystery works well.
They are spending their honeymoon travelling incognito on a cruise from Earth to Mars, accompanied only by Gimlet, Tesla’s service dog, a small white Westie. He is a former detective, made famous by a reality TV show. She is a fabulously rich heiress who, before her tragic accident, was a leader in cyber engineering.
The amateur sleuthing couple, Tesla Crane and her husband Shal are engaging and, beneath the charm, quite redoubtable. The tone of the storytelling channelled the sangfroid, charm and mild humour of upper-class amateur sleuths from an early golden-age mystery to tell the tale of a murder on a luxury space liner. Mary Robinette lives in Nashville with her husband Rob and over a dozen manual typewriters.I loved the style of ‘The Spare Man’. She records fiction for authors such as Seanan McGuire, Cory Doctorow and John Scalzi. Her designs have garnered two UNIMA-USA Citations of Excellence, the highest award an American puppeteer can achieve.
Her novel Calculating Stars is one of only eighteen novels to win the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards in a single year.Īs a professional puppeteer and voice actor (SAG/AFTRA), Mary Robinette has performed for LazyTown (CBS), the Center for Puppetry Arts, Jim Henson Pictures, and founded Other Hand Productions. Stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s, several Year’s Best anthologies and her collections Word Puppets and Scenting the Dark and Other Stories. She’s a member of the award-winning podcast Writing Excuses and has received the Astounding Award for Best New Writer, four Hugo awards, the RT Reviews award for Best Fantasy Novel, the Nebula, and Locus awards.
Mary Robinette Kowal is the author of the Lady Astronaut Universe and historical fantasy novels: The Glamourist Histories series and Ghost Talkers.
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