Lockstep: Great premise, disappointing execution

Lockstep by Karl Schroeder

I’m starting to feel like a broken record (Google it kids) here the past month or so, having had the same general reaction to a long run of books now — “good premise, flawed execution.” The latest perpetrator is Lockstep, a new YA space opera by Karl Schroeder, who has come up with a wonderfully engaging premise and setting, but has failed to create that same sense of engagement with regard to the characters and plot.

Way back in time in the Lockstep universe, Earth was controlled by the super-rich. In order to escape that highly stratified world, Toby McGonigal’s family buys Sedna (a real recently discovered trans-Neptunian planetoid smaller than Pluto’s moon) and sets up an independent colony. While there, Toby, the eldest child, is sent to claim one of Sedna’s moon’s and accidentally goes into suspended animation, only to wake 14,000 years later. Soon after he had disappeared, going into “sleep” (“wintering over”) became standard practice on Sedna — the colonists would sleep for year — using up no precious resources while robots did whatever was necessary to mine/grow/process/manufacture, etc. — and when the people woke up, they’d live a good month consuming resources, trading, and so forth, then go back to sleep. Eventually this became the typical fashion for colonizing and maintaining the new worlds — everyone would be on the same “lockstep’” cycle of wintering over (for decades by now), waking and “living,” then wintering over again. This way you could travel to another planet in sleep, arrive, stay in orbit, then wake when they do, and it would be as if it took you a mere day out of your life. The system cleverly obviates the need for FTL technology.

By the time Toby awakes, the lockstep universe has thousands of planets (most not actual planets, but smaller objects such as Sedna), and to his surprise, his brother and sister basically rule the Empire, his family having grown incredibly rich and powerful early on due to their monopoly on the original sleep technology. Because it furthered their aims, his siblings allowed/encouraged an entire mythology based on Toby (nobody ever knew what happened to him) as progenitor of the Lockstep concept and of his eventual savior-like return. Unfortunately, that was always predicated on the assumption he never would return, and now that he has, his siblings see him as a threat to their power, one they feel the need to remove by all means possible. Soon Toby is fleeing for his life, helped along by Corva, a young girl who has her own personal issues with how the Empire is run, even as his appearance causes all sorts of disturbing ripples — political, social, religious — throughout the universe.

As mentioned, I really like the thinking behind this premise. I enjoyed learning how it gradually came about, I like how it is reasoned out and solves in large part the question of how one has a multi-planet/multi-system society without FTL drives (which often involve a lot of handwaving). Along with that, because of how the Lockstep planets are out of the normal time line, they become witnesses to and a kind of seed bank for the “fast worlds”:

They gave rise to godlike AIs, and these grew bored and left the galaxy, or died, … or ran berserk… On many worlds humans wiped themselves out, or were wiped out by their creations… [there were] expansions, contractions, raptures, uploading, downloading, mind control, body-swapping plagues… wars, dark ages… when those would-be gods had wiped themselves out, the telltale silence from formerly buzzing stars would alert this or that lockstep, and they would send some colonists back. A few millennia later, the human population on Earth and the other lit worlds would again number in the billions or trillions.

It’s a great concept and I love visualizing how all that really cool space-opera-y stuff that is usually the basis/focus of a novel here becomes “weird stuff that happened while we were sleeping.”

As good as the premise are the tours we see of a few of the worlds, which are imaginatively crafted by Schroeder, such as one whose cities float in the midst of a gas giant: “the bubble he was in was at least a kilometer across, yet it was attached to an unknown number of others, like one soap bubble clinging to a raft of others… hover [ing] high in the atmosphere of some vast, dark planet.”

While I really liked the stage dressing, though, the characters and story were a different matter. None of the characters ever flashed to life for me — Toby, Corva, side characters all were pretty flat (side characters in fact had almost no discerning traits across the board).
Both Toby and Corva are a bit too passive, reacting more than acting, which combined with their flat characterization, makes it hard to care much what happens with them.

The plot has some pacing issues — moving too slowly in some places and too abruptly in others. There are some clunky expositional scenes. And I think it gives little away to say that one can see the romantic angle coming from light years away (sigh — couldn’t we once throw a male and female together and not have them fall in love? Please?).

By the end, the last 50-75 pages or so, I was tempted to start skimming, though I resisted the urge. Better pacing and characters as vividly drawn as the settings they moved through and Lockstep could have been a thoroughly enjoyable read. As it stands, it’s moderately pleasing through parts, lags in a bit too many sections, and ends up disappointing.