Up Against It

By: M. J. Locke

Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell

Geoff and his friends live in Phocaea, a distant asteroid colony on the Solar System's frontier. They're your basic high-spirited young adults, enjoying such pastimes as hacking matter compilers to produce dancing skeletons that prance through the low-gee communal areas, using their rocket-bikes to salvage methane ice shrapnel that flies away when the colony brings in a big (and vital) rock of the stuff, and figuring out how to avoid the ubiquitous surveillance motes that are the million eyes of 'Stroiders, a reality-TV show whose Earthside producers have paid handsomely for the privilege of spying on every detail of the Phocaeans' lives.

Life isn't as good as it seems, though. A mysterious act of sabotage kills Geoff's brother, Carl, and puts the entire colony at risk. And in short order, we discover that the whole thing may have been cooked up by the Martian mafia, as a means of executing a coup and turning Phocaea into a client-state. As if that wasn't bad enough, there's a rogue AI that was spawned during the industrial emergency and slipped through the distracted safeguards, and a giant X-factor in the form of the Viridians, a transhumanist cult that lives in Phocaea's bowels.

In addition to Geoff, our story revolves around Jane, the colony's resource manager - a bureaucrat engineer in charge of keeping the plumbing running on an artificial island of humanity poised on the knife-edge of hard vacuum and unforgiving space. She's more than a century old, and good at her job, but she is torn between the technical demands of the colony and the political realities of her situation, in which the fishbowl effect of 'Stroiders is compounded by a reputation economy that turns every person into a beauty-contest competitor. Her maneuverings to keep politics and engineering in harmony are the heart of the book.

©2011 Laura J. Mixon-Gould (P)2011 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

"Compulsively readable and packed with challenging ideas.... Locke has created a believable ecosystem of struggling, competing, sometimes uncomfortably interacting components, where trust is betrayed painfully, but allies appear unexpectedly. Most of all, this smart, satisfying hard SF adventure celebrates human resilience." (Publishers Weekly)

"Rigorous extrapolation with an imaginative flair, characters you can care about, and clean, lean, muscular prose are some of the hallmarks of M. L. Locke, a bright light on the science fiction scene. Fans of hard SF will eat this up and shout for more.” (George R. R. Martin)

incredible world building; I didn't want it to sto

So well written it would be perfect to realize the alternate universe does exist where this is reality. Epic world building and intimate problems intertwine until you don't know whether the character is going to have a nervous breakdown or the asteroid colony is going to explode or hacker coded art projects will consume everyone!

Every character is so relatable in their own hyper realistic way, every hero a human speck of dust in their own story.

I couldn't get enough...Sequel squeel!

Solid pulpy fun

Good read with good narration. Good story, my only problem is the "teens saving the day" aspect. Pretty much all of the other characters are only in situations they seeked out, the kids accidently end up at the center of a few plotlines.

Story also takes some suspension of disbelief, the major event that starts the book is pretty unbelivable from an engineering standpoint. It's like building a nuclear plant on a fault line, just asking for trouble.

Very old school SF, in ways good and bad

This book was a bit of an odd pastiche of various classic science fiction elements that was never bad, but never kept me on the edge of my seat. The novel is told from two perspectives during a crisis in an asteroid colony: an administrator and a young "rocket biker." The teenager sections feel like classic YA science fiction (Heinlein, perhaps), where a kid (whose parents obviously don't understand him) and his gang of friends keep being in the right (or wrong) place, and therefore have a chance to be heroes repeatedly. The administrator is written with some interesting nuance, but never becomes emotionally engaging.

The same problems with the characters - obviousness mixed good, but not compelling, ideas - color all the other parts of the novel. There is some very detailed technical world building, but also lots of hand-wavy bits. There is some interesting future sociology, mixed in with SF cliches, like the US devolving into the "Christian States of America." There are some nice action scenes, but the pieces are put in place in ways that make the novel seem forced.

This isn't a failure of a novel, but it is less satisfying then, say, Levianthan Wakes, which has a lot of similarities (near future, near Earth space opera). If you are looking for a long classically-inspired science fiction novel, this might work for you, but I don't think it is worth the time. The reader, however, is excellent.

An exciting, engaging space adventure

Geoff and his friends on the asteroid Phocaea, just graduated from school, pull of an epic technical hack. They successfully dodge the omnipresent camera remotes of "Stroiders, a reality show broadcasting the lives of the Phocaeans to the entire system. It's a triumph.

It's quickly followed by someone's shocking act of sabotage that kills Geoff's brother, wtih Geoff and his friends, as well as Carl's boss, arriving too late to save him.

And even that is just the start.

The sabotage that kills Carl starts a meltdown of a delivery of much-needed water and methane ice, vital not just to the colony's economy but its survival.

Jane, the colony's resource director, has a major disaster on her hands.

It's also a political crisis. The sabotage might be part of a plot by that Martian mafia to engineer a takeover of Phocaea. Jane has to juggle resources, technical issues, and politics to attempt to avert either mass death, or political takeover by the mob.

The worldbuilding is well thought out, and the characters are interestingly complex. The plot moves along, and is nicely intricate.

But what really hooked me on this one is that it has the feel of The Good Old Stuff, without the 1950s social dynamics. Gender equality and racial/ethnic equality are taken for granted. (Well, standard human ethnic/racial equality. This future sill has its issues. What Locke has done with the Viridians is really interesting.)

It's a great read or listen, and I look forward to more from Locke.

Recommended.

I bought this audiobook.

Very enjoyable SciFi novel

I really enjoy this book. It full of action and sub plots which made it a great read.

Sequel Please!

M. J. Locke is a bit of a mystery to me. The personal website seems to have a lot of extraneous information, and it took a little digging to find out that this is the pen name of the author, Laura J. Mixon, if my information is correct. I am hopeful for a sequel because, although this book can end as a stand alone, it certainly has potential for continuation.

Up Against it introduces us to a future where man has conquered the stars and colonized various planets in the solar system. In this timeline planets run their own governments and face a list of issues such as corruption, resources, and greed. The main focus of this book is on an asteroid colony called Phocaea. Life here is a struggle for a people who live day by day just scraping by, and in order to survive the inhabitants must harvest ice to power their systems. M. J. Locke seems to dabble in many different topics in this book. The main theme examines how humans have become reliant on technology. The author shows a planet Earth that has been overcome with greed and has contracted with fellow colonies to spy upon them at certain times of the day. Locke introduces us a very technological society with different devices used for recording every day life and controlling systems responsible for survival in space. There is a considerable amount of focus on the political system of Phocaea and different facets of its culture. We get a look at gender topics in a part of society where citizens have infused technology and genetics to create a new sort of human being. Locke even explores the creation of an artificial intelligence and proceeds to give us the perspective of a machine for a few chapters. Locke switches perspectives between several different main characters that include a resource official responsible for obtaining the needed ice for the colony's survival and a boy named Geoff. With the colony in an ice crisis there are multiple plots that arise, mysteries to be solved, subterfuge to be detected, and new dangers to be faced by our protagonists. Even though there are many different topics, the author attempts to explore there was sufficient meat to the story to drive the listener through the telling. Inspired by clever writing, events converge by the end to wrap things up with satisfying conclusions.

Cassandra Campbell did a fine job with the narration. I thought she even did a decent job with the masculine voices. There was enough expression in the right places to make the characters engaging. And although I had to pause and rewind a few times to catch some details, it was more due to the style of the writing (such as the computer lingo) and not the execution.

Splendid Baroque Space-Opera

This book has all the elements of a great old-school baroque space-opera (including young adults saving the universe, emergent digital intelligences, and fun with orbital mechanics), with some new twists (ubiquitous reality TV fishbowling). There are occasional very minor continuity problems, but they don't get in the way. Ms. Cambpell is versatile, and each of the many characters has a unique voice. Highly recommended!

Loved it. More please.

Excellent world building and exploration of humanity’s future. I’d love to hear more in future releases.

very good hard Sci-Fi book

nice high tech stuff, great AI, great plot in general. quite entertaining.
no details on the spaceships tho.
as good as Ben Bova or K.J. Anderson

Besides cockroaches, politics and the mob survive

MJ Locke's Up Against It is futuristic story that takes place on an outlying asteroid. A bizarre factory accident that develops into sabotage puts the colony at risk and at the mercy of a Martian mob crime family and a feral sapient computer intelligence. Various individuals in the colony do their best to save their society from either total destruction or totalitarian takeover.

The sci-fi elements are minimal with standard space flight and engineering capabilities to force an asteroid to support life for thousands of people leading routine lives. There is intriguing nanotech as well as medical advances for longer lifespans and human genetic modifications. Artificial intelligence arises purely from complex computer systems, but with the novel twist of creating a language in song for communication as well as evolving from child to adult. Basically, the story revolves around two main characters, a teenager living in the shadow of an older and more favored brother and the commissioner of resources allocation for the asteroid who must deal with governmental politics, external forces, and advanced social media. The overlap of mob intention along with the feral sapient results in a complex detective mystery to identify everyone's true motives.

The narration is well done with a solid range of voices for both genders.