Book review: "Steal Across the Sky"

A sci-fi novel with appeal for all readers

By Jim Higgins of the Journal Sentinel

Posted: Jun. 6, 2009 4:00 p.m.

To the best of my knowledge, Nancy Kress does not enter a sterile clean room when she gets down to work. But she is responsible for some of our most creative experiments in genetic engineering.

This former fourth-grade teacher has won multiple Hugos and Nebulas, science fiction's top honors, for her stories, which often play out the implications, positive and distressing, of altering human genes.

In her signature "Sleepless" trilogy, which grew out of her novella "Beggars in Spain," people reshuffle the genome themselves, creating humans who don't sleep, and raising profound questions about what the genetically gifted owe or don't owe the normal ones.

But in her new novel, "Steal Across the Sky," Earthlings were unsuspecting lab rats for a species now calling themselves the Atoners, who have returned 10,000 years later to make amends for their sins.

The Atoners, who hide behind screens and electronic communications, interview volunteers and choose 21 to go into space, to witness the descendants of humans who were seeded on other planets in an experiment. Lucca, a rich, depressed young widower, witnesses on Kular A, where a peaceful people live simply but manifest an unusual power that he struggles to understand. Cam, a passionate American and briefly Lucca's lover on the space flight, is dropped into a violent, militaristic world on Kular B.

Lucca is on the planet of the unchanged people; Cam reconnects with him there after a crisis. The third human witness, Soledad, monitoring them from the orbiting spaceship, puts it together: The Atoners turned off a gene in Earth's humans, depriving them of a sensory power they once had. The people on Kular A and six other planets still have that sense. An Atoner recording confirms Soledad's hypothesis and expresses the species' regret for its actions.

Human reactions to Soledad's startling discovery drive the rest of the novel. Even the Witnesses, now both celebrities and marked men and women on Earth, can't agree on the meaning of what they discovered. Governments spy on them, hunting for scraps of info about the Atoners, some of whom are holed up on a Moon base.

Opportunists abound, and hate groups swing into action.

That's the skeleton of a complex plot, but it doesn't describe Kress' skill in creating characters: the moody, loyal Lucca; passionate, driven Cam; lonely, thoughtful Soledad. A longtime writing teacher, Kress composes with grace and economy. A writer who prefers shorter forms, Kress has constructed this novel as a series of short chapters from different points of view. Sometimes she even gives us the same events from more than one perspective: We see how both Cam and a Kular B native experienced the same crisis.

Kress breaks up these character-driven episodes with faux documents that supply background or context, and that satirize human responses to major news: a Witness interview (with attached sticky-note comment); a Web site page about fighting alien abduction; an "Oprah" transcript; an intelligence briefing; even a New Yorker cartoon triggered by Soledad's discovery. This cultural part of Kress' game has grown even from the brilliance of the "Sleepless" novels.

What makes Kress so stimulating and pleasurable to read is that her fiction is always multidimensional. In sci-fi terms, "Steal Across the Sky" is a genetic engineering story, but also a space travel story, a first contact story, even a military/law-enforcement story. She cares about character, plot and language; ideas and emotions; the fates of individuals and of societies and species.

Jim Higgins edits the Sunday Cue section.

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