Finder

Written by Suzanne Palmer, Finder is a perfectly fine sci-fi novel that offers an overfamiliar, but, for the most part, well-told story about a cocky smuggler caught in a war when trying to steal a spaceship.

The protagonist, Fergus Ferguson, is actually not called a smuggler, but a finder: a person whose job is to locate certain objects and retrieve them for whoever is paying him. He’s a hulky red-haired man and the type of person who is usually in the wrong place at the wrong time. So, when Ferguson travels to a space colony to steal a ship from a warlord named Gilger, he inadvertently gets inside a cable car with an old woman called Mattie Vahn, who just happens to be on Gilger’s blacklist. After the car explodes and Ferguson barely escapes with his life, his mission gets a lot more complicated when he is rescued by what appears to be a bunch of that old woman’s younger clones.

Ferguson is a Han Solo-esque type of character: a reckless, sarcastic man with a simple mindset when it comes to his work. In his own words, being a finder comes down to, “I go, I see, I think, I take.” Despite his constant witty remarks, he’s a good man, being quick to reject plans that may endanger innocent lives. He’s haunted by the troubled relationship he had with his mother – who once beat him with a broom just because he had moved an object of her treasured collection without permission – and her passsion toward certain objects clearly translates into his present job.

Ferguson, of course, likes to think of himself as a lone wolf, a man who prefers to work alone and who chooses solitude and isolation because it means social and emotional distancing: “I don’t want to leave behind people who will miss me, or who will pick up broken bits of my life to mourn over,” he confesses in one scene. Although he believes it to be a noble sentiment – the point is to never make anyone he cares about suffer – the narrative doesn’t take long to frame it as a condescending attitude.

The protagonist is often criticized by the characters around him, never having his self-pity and patronizing attitude validated by the narrative. One of the clones that save him, a woman called Mari, is the main character responsible for calling Ferguson on his bullshit. Every chance Ferguson gets, he tries to get her out of harm’s way – for her own good and against her own will – and every chance Mari gets, she proves that she can handle dangerous situations much better than him.

The story offers a Han Solo-esque type of adventure. There’s a heist, a McGuffin, spaceships, and very ludicrous plans that, against all odds, always manage to work out alright in the end. There’s a playful tone to the proceedings, with characters constantly commenting on how doomed they are with a snarky remark and events escalating to absurd set-pieces, while irony and sarcasm punctuate most banter. There’s a scene in which a woman named Mauda gives Fergus Ferguson a fake ID in the name of Anders Anderson, for example, and says, “I assumed alliteration was your thing.” Mauda lives with Mari, Muire, Minnie, Myrtle, and Mella.

When events get serious, however, the writing is unable to shift gracefully to a sterner tone, mainly because these more impactful events are few and far between, which makes them feel out of place in the narrative: a scene in which a certain character murders two soldiers, for example, becomes suddenly somber as this character reveals to be shocked by the gravity of his action, although a lot of bad people had died until that point without the story ever stopping to reflect upon their deaths. It’s true that the character in question is not Ferguson – which is the book’s main point of view and so the main one responsible for its light-hearted atmosphere – but the shift in tone, although somewhat justified, is still jarring, especially since things don’t take long to become playful again. If the book had truly stopped to reflect on what had happened, showing what the absence of similar moments until that point says about Ferguson as a character, the scene could have worked. The way it is, however, it’s just inconsistent.

The plot remains simple for the most part, even with its good share of warring factions and shady characters. Ferguson’s plan is to steal back Gilger’s ship, but to have a chance of accomplishing this he will need the unsolicited help of the Vahn family, who Gilger’s right-hand man and executioner wants dead due to a couple of prejudices: “cloning is an abomination to Faithers because clones cannot have souls. And they’re independent women on top of that.” Few things go as Ferguson plans, of course, which puts him in the middle of a civil war.

His main companion is Mari, who stands out with her “I kick ass” attitude. She’s the one who is often doing the saving instead of Ferguson, and working as the moral compass of the book, repeatedly showing the protagonist why he’s being a patronizing douchebag. Mari and Ferguson are outsiders, and this feeling of not belonging anywhere is the central theme of the novel, with both characters sharing a similar mindset: they both tolerate people’s prejudices and just distance themselves from everyone.

Finally, the presence of the Asiig, a menacing alien race that dwells near Mari’s colony, is both a narrative strength and the book’s main weakness. They are portrayed as a scary, unfathomable force: no one knows what they want and what they do to the people they often take, and there’s a colony-wide alarm when just one of their ships appears nearby, which makes even warring factions put a stop to their fighting. Initially, the Asiig makes for an interesting mystery, but they never end up amounting to anything more than a plot device: they function more as a deus ex machina than anything else, which makes the mystery surrounding them a bit anticlimactic.

Finder offers a fun, but ultimately forgettable ride. It accomplishes most of what it tries to do, but if it had aimed higher maybe its few missteps would have stood out less.

November 12, 2020.