The eponymous vessel of Richard Paul Russo's Ship of Fools is the starship Argonos, a massive generation ship that has been crawling through space for centuries. Unfortunately, its history has been forgotten--the ship's inhabitants believe they originated from Earth, but all historical records have been lost, and now the ship wanders aimlessly from star system to star system, its mission unknown, hoping to re-discover the rest of humanity.

Russo is really an excellent writer: his sentences are simple but elegant, his dialogue genuine, his paragraphs and section breaks expertly paced. He produces no passages of stylistic virtuosity, but he nevertheless manages to enhance the decrepit but high-tech feel of the story with clean but effective writing that immediately conveys the cynical, sickly, and corrupt atmosphere aboard the Argonos.

The cast of characters could have been concocted by Mervyn Peake or China Mieville: among them, Bartolomeo Aguilera, the deformed narrator who stalks through the ship in his deliberately mechanical exoskeleton; Nikos, the ship's embattled captain, who schemes to maintain his control; and the Bishop, the atheistic leader of a Church that, with the ship, has lost its way. This novel is not primarily about its characters, but Russo nevertheless shapes each one into a living individual. The Bishop, in particular, is an impressive creation, and the ultimate shaking (and perhaps reshaping) of his faith is one of the more interesting quiet moments in the book.

Indeed, for a novel about a spaceship, Ship of Fools is concerned to a surprising extent about faith: faith in other people, in the existence of an omnipotent God, in the eventual possibility of landfall. That being said, for every effective exploration of faith, Russo feels compelled to tack on a well-written but nonetheless extraneous dialogue in which the issue can be discussed at greater depth--to the detriment of the ongoing narrative.

Thankfully, Russo keeps such extraneous discussions at a minimum, and emphasizes the book's real strengths: its incredible "hook," and its nail-biting tension. The initial premise of a generations-old spaceship is merely the bait that gets the reader to start reading. What keeps the reader going, however, is a shocking discovery made by the Argonos when it eagerly follows a beacon emanating from the barren planet of Antioch: a cavernous chamber filled with rows of skeletons, each one either hanging on its own hook or impaled into the wall. The ship's inhabitants (at least the upper-class ruling councils) reel in horror at the sight; Bartolomeo, one of the first to witness the skeletons, has nightmares about them for months afterward. The Argonos flees, but then uncovers an even greater mystery: a truly alien ship, the first of its kind, that seems to have been abandoned in deep space.

What is so disappointing about Ship of Fools, and what prevents this novel from becoming a science-fiction classic, is the way in which Russo resolves these tantalizing mysteries in the most ho-hum fashion possible. Nothing deep or complicated underlies the abattoir at Antioch, nor the deserted alien ship; instead, the novel quickly transforms itself into a traditional scary movie (and not a particularly good one at that), with a cast of thousands stranded in an isolated area with a bunch of freakish monsters. Even worse, Russo ends the novel leaving the vast majority of its most interesting plot threads unresolved: the plague of catatonia, the true purpose and history behind the Argonos, etc. etc.

That being said, while its ultimate resolution is deeply disappointing, Ship of Fools is a very fun ride, with long sections of real tension and a truly wonderful setup. If Russo ever writes a sequel that cashes in on the implicit promises he made here, this book could very well be seen in the future as a classic. Until then, however, it is nothing more than a highly promising but ultimately deficient thriller.

Copyright © 2003 Steven Wu