While the majority of Tom Holt's novel have played
with the ideas of various gods and monsters coming to life in our
mundane world, in Blonde Bombshell, Holt turns his attend to
science fiction, introducing the Oster, a canine race who are set on the
destruction of Earth because we're playing the music too loudly. Holt
splits his points of view between George Stetchkin, a security
professional who believes his dog was kidnapped by aliens, Lucy Pavlov,
a computer genius who has replaced Microsoft as the go-to company for
technology, and Mark Two, an intelligent Oster bomb, which goes by the
name Mark Twain.
Holt juggles the three story lines well, and
introduces interesting, if quirky, difficulties to each. Stetchkin
is shot early in the novel by two mugs straight out of film noir central
casting. Pavlov questions her sanity when she spots what looks
like a unicorn on her private property in Novosibirsk. Mark Twain
must figure out how to make his way among humans after he downloads part
of himself into an anthropomorphic probe in perhaps the most satirical
sections of the book. Eventually, Holt begins to bring all his
plot lines together, creating a business relationship between Stetchkin
and Pavlov, and a rather stranger one between Pavlov and Mark Twain.
Along the way, Holt provides details of the Oster
society, heavily based on the concept of the Alpha male. Oster
civilization is not entirely fleshed out, but Holt shows enough of it
that the reader can get the feel for ways in which it is similar, and
more importantly, different than our own civilization. Holt
doesn’t present the Oster as any sort of Utopian society, but merely
as a race that is as egotistical as our own trying (perhaps) to preserve
what they perceive as their place in the universe.
Not only does Mark Twain’s attempts to fit into
our culture provide a look at human society, notably the bomb’s
short-lived career in a cubicle farm, but other agents of the Oster find
a similarly difficult time adapting to their more humanoid forms. A
pair of siblings are sent to Earth on a mysterious, but possibly
beneficial, mission which begins with their attempt on Stetchkin’s
life. Their misadventures further allow Holt to look at our
culture with his satirical eye.
The plotting of the novel and the humor don’t
always work to each other’s benefit and it almost seems as if Holt was
damping down his humor in order to plot the intricacies of the attempted
Oster destruction of the Earth, the mechanizations of the alien ruling
class, and the interactions between his characters (whether human, bomb,
or Oster). However, he does include some clever ideas that could
easily be spun off on their own, most notably the Copts, with whom
Stetchkin interacts all too briefly.
As an initial foray into humorous science fiction,
instead of fantasy, Blonde Bombshell demonstrates that Holt can
make the leap to science fiction. His aliens are interesting, even
before he reveals their secret, and their attempts to get by on each, no
matter what their form, is wonderful.
