Here's how James Alan Gardner explains the central premise of Expendable, his swift and easy-to-read science-fiction novel about the high-risk, high-fatality Explorer Corps:

In a society where people expect to ease comfortably out of this world at a ripe old age, the thought of anyone being killed in the prime of life is deeply disturbing. If it happens to someone you know, the effect is devastating.

Unless... the person who dies is different. Not like everyone else.

Two centuries ago, the Admiralty High Council secretly acknowledged that some deaths hurt Fleet morale more than others. If the victim was popular, well-liked, and above all, physically attractive, fellow crewmates took the death hard. Performance ratings dropped by as much as thirty percent. Friends of the deceased required lengthy psychological counseling. Those who had ordered the fatal mission sometimes felt a permanently impairing guilt.

But if the victim was not so popular, not so well-liked, and above all, ugly... well, bad things happen, but we all have to carry on.

What this means, Gardner quickly explains, is that ugly people get sent down to dangerous planets. Ugly people get to meet potentially hostile alien cultures first. Ugly people get to see if the exotic and beautiful from a distance is deadly up close.

Those ugly people are the Explorers, a.k.a. Expendable Crew Members (ECM).

This is, of course, a completely ridiculous premise. Thank goodness that the novel moves so fast, you hardly notice that its central conceit makes little sense. Gardner has structured Expendable as a series of short, punchy narrative segments. The action spurts along in little fits of prose: a bit of dialogue here; a significant encounter there; and look, here's somebody dying. And even within these little segments, Gardner wastes little time with unnecessary words: it's a rare paragraph in Expendable that's more than a sentence or two.

Gardner's swift storytelling makes Expendable easy to read, but it also unfortunately makes his speculative universe seem a little bit thin. And that's too bad, because he has some interesting tidbits that he throws in there--particularly his oblique references to an omniscient League of Peoples, a mysterious universal governing body that immediately and utterly executes any entity who even considers murdering a sentient being. (One of the funniest and most macabre stories in Expendable is Admiral Chee's story about the Greenstriders being wiped out for negligently poisoning a human delegation with their skin excretions.)

Anyway, Gardner's main point isn't really to show off his universe-creation or wow us with his prose style. Instead, his plot quickly establishes the necessary background and then throws us the obligatory pulp-fiction hook. His protagonists are being sent to a planet called Melaquin, which has an interesting trait: within two hours of landing, each of the dozens of Explorer who had been sent down there went Oh Shit (to use the local language) and simply vanished from communications. And no one has any idea why they disappeared.

Festina Ramos--who is Expendable because she was born with a wine mark on her face--is part of the latest Melaquin expedition. About a third of the way into the book (it's already "Part VI"), she gets sent down to Melaquin with a few other sacrificial lambs, including the mad Admiral Chee. Let's just say she survives. Then glass people start showing up, and the plot becomes kind of weird.

I have to admit that after the utterly mundane mystery of Melaquin is explained, the plot lags for a couple of segments. But Gardner is good enough that it picks up again, although the book is quite different, and all this random stuff keeps happening. (Phylar Tobit? What the hell?) I never quite lost the feeling, though, that Gardner was making stuff up as he went along.

But so what? Expendable is, ultimately, a very shallow book, with a swift-moving plot and a plucky, likeable protagonist in Festina Ramos. It doesn't break any new ground in the genre. It doesn't leave any lasting impressions. (Just try to see if you can remember the details of the plot one month later.) But it is readable and fun, you can finish it in a day, and there are no real groaners lurking in the writing or the story. You could do a lot worse.

Copyright © 2004 Steven Wu