Book Review: The Last Dance by Martin Shoemaker

The Last Dance by Martin L. Shoemaker
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a collection of short stories about one Captain Aames, whose has had a role in the initial stages of the exploration and colonization of Mars. And is now Captain of the main transport to Mars, the Aldrin. And the framing device is that of an Inspector General Park as she has conversations with crew and past crew of Aames. And we find that Aames is not nice, to put it mildly. But he is highly competent, and those who stay with him say that this level of competence is what has saved their lives, and in the lessons they learned saved the lives of those they were with.

So, each of the stories is told as a conversation between IG Park and the crew member about a historical episode that is meant to provide Park with some background intended to sway Park to their preferred outcome, and Park is very aware that she is dealing with unreliable narrators who are in some way self-serving. And this dynamic makes the characters believable. Everyone, including Captain Aames, who does not actually appear until late, is flawed (and Captain Aames explicitly states that he knows it, which makes him even more larger than life in the eyes of his crew). All of the sympathetic characters (Aames, his crew, and IG Park) grow over the course of each story.

Yes, the overall story is competence porn, and I'm a sucker for those. And the better versions of that are those where things go wrong, even if the hero is part of how it happened, because things go wrong in life. But the hero does not give up. And it is not one heroic act that makes it work, it is the development of a plan that can work, and everyone doing their part to make it work, because that is how real life works too. And here, the hero is not the hero because of what he does, it is because he gets everyone around him to rise to the occasion and take their role in making everything work.

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