Gareth Powell’s Jitterbug takes Powell’s talents for Space Opera and sets them into a Baxterian-like story of Big Dumb Objects, a starship crew, and the fate of humanity.
The fate of humanity and the universe is nothing new for Gareth Powell. He’s written plenty of large scale science fiction, be it Future’s Edge, with a destroyed Earth and alien artifacts, or Stars and Bones, with humanity on arks, or the Embers of Wars novels, full of Big Dumb Objects. But always, going back earlier to his Ack-Ack Macaque novels, it’s in the end about the characters, not all of them human, that really is the center of the story.
In Jitterbug, however, Powell keeps his character focused style of novel and story, and enlarges the outside scale even more this time.
The scene is the solar system, but not as we know it. Two generations ago in the time frame of the novel, something started disassembling the solar system and started constructing a big dumb object, in the style of habitable large sun-orbiting orbitals, around the sun. There are no signs of actual aliens, even if it is clear that something extrasolar is doing this. The wave of deconstruction has reached Mars, and it seems just like a question of time before Earth is the target. And so many people have gone off to create new life in the offworld colonies on The Swirl, still uncertain as to who or what is making these habitats and why.
In the meantime, the focus of the novel is on the crew of a hardscrabble bounty hunting ship, The Jitterbug. And it is when one of their bounties goes wrong that the novel kicks off. A story of piracy, and secrets and government intrigue soon spirals into something much weirder, and much wider. What seems to be a simple bounty turns into a cross solar system chase with implications political, system wide, and beyond.
Detailing that spiraling out and what is revealed would be intensely spoilery, so I am going to instead focus this on how this novel fits in with Powell’s oeuvre and how it executes and fits within that lens. Powell’s space opera novels have generally featured a tight cast of characters on a spaceship¹, often independent, in deep space. The titular Jitterbug is such a ship, a group of bounty hunters seeking to bring miscreants on the run from the big wide frontier of the Swirl habitats. It’s something of a hardscrabble life, living on the edge—and that is not even looking at the big picture of the solar system being rearranged. Powell’s characters are often trying to get by on a wing and a prayer. Bounty Hunting is making a living the hard way and so the Jitterbug crew tries to do their best.
So that set of characters. Copernicus Brown, the primary point of view, is the captain of the Jitterbug. He inherited the ship and the job from his father. He could have been a farmer on some stretch of the Swirl, or have a life on Luna, but instead, Copernicus takes care of the ship and runs down bounties. He has a past and additional motivations to keep plugging at the job with his crew. Our next point of view character is a bit of a departure for Powell and that’s because it is a politician, Danielle Lanzo. She’s the Deputy Speaker of the Solar Assembly and so is one of the most powerful people in the solar system. She jumps onto the page and defies the stereotypes, as a politician who IS willing to do something and take action. She eventually winds up on the Jitterbug and helps kick off the next phase of the plot. And given the big decisions and revelations at the end of the novel, having Lanzo on the spot does make some of what happens easier to go down.
Amber Roth is and has the MacGuffin of the novel. We find her hiding in a water tank of a derelict ship that the Jitterbug finds in the opening of the novel. A thief, conwoman, pirate, and a whole slew of secrets, I feel like Powell had a lot of enjoyment in writing her as a character. I’m not sure I can trust her as far as I can throw her, even in Lunar gravity, but she’s certainly interesting to watch. And with a fair amount of POV chapters, we get to know her and her deal pretty well. All of these POV characters have well written arcs and development, from Brown trying to find his way in the wake of his father, to Amber facing up to her past and learning to trust, to Lanzo learning to step up onto the biggest stage to help humanity.
Finally, we have the last point of view character, the Jitterbug themselves.
And that brings us to the next element of Powell’s oeuvre that manifests here. Going all the way back to his earliest work in novels, Powell has been fascinated with having artificial intelligence as characters, and in particular, intelligent starships. Powell loves to explore sentient beings who are not human, but have to and do interact with humans. The titular Jitterbug (and that does bring to question—is Jitterbug really meant to be the primary POV here, and not Copernicus?) fits very well in the oeuvre of intelligent starships, and in a real way takes a starring role in the book.
The power of individuals to make a difference is a running theme in Powell’s novels and we get that in spades, here. The crew of the Jitterbug have to make hard choices and quick decisions, and it is being willing to take those stands and act against dire odds that is a highlight of Powell’s writing, as I have read in previous works of his. Powell has a fundamental feel that humans are good, and when push comes to shove, will do the right thing, and sacrifice for the greater good, if necessary. Even an antagonist in this novel, in the end, makes a heroic action in keeping with this philosophy.
Cinema and visual writing. Powell’s style in his novels is vivid, cinematic (close in) and immersive in its point of view. Powell’s style is less suited to a wide expanse of a big dumb object, and more suited to seeing the characters and the set pieces from the point of view of the characters. The world may be gigantic, infinite, but the point of view keeps us grounded and in the heads and minds of the characters.
I could have wished for more of the Swirl, but since we very much don’t go there except briefly, the Swirl does feel somewhat amorphous and not as well described as I would have liked. The Swirl, anyway, feels like an American Western Frontier, a vast landscape that Powell has there, but is much less interested in exploring that landscape and more interested in exploring the interior lives of the characters. The Swirl is a big dumb object, but in the end it’s the background image for events and while its size and scale are conveyed at points, this is not the Ringworld-style sense of wonder at its sheer scale.
The novel is in conversation with trends in genre, too. The Dark Forest hypothesis² as encapsulated in the Cixin Liu novel of the same name comes in here for discussion in the ever expanding and widening last portion of the novel. Given the plot and revelations of the last portion of the novel., I feel that Powell is reaching toward not just Liu territory, but reaching for the wide open big scale of Stephen Baxter. Powell’s style is diametrically different and is character-focused and developed. Copernicus, the Jitterbug themselves. Lanzo and Amber are vivid and well rounded characters. While Baxter’s characters are not true cardboard, Powell excels at characterization in a way that Baxter does not. We feel the decisions that Copernicus and the others make. When two characters find each other, we feel that connection, too, vividly. To flip that coin, though, Powell tries, but does not quite succeed in my opinion, to hit the Baxterian heights of scale that he is going for in this book. A Baxter novel with this plot would be much thicker (Jitterbug is a lean and mean read at 300 pages).
Overall, Jitterbug fits nicely in the Powell mold of short, snappy space opera novels with characters front and center, and at the same time hitting the notes and themes of the subgenre, fitting it nicely in the genre conversation. It’s a lean and mean space opera novel and a fine example of Powell doing what he does best.
Highlights:
Lean and mean Space Opera from an author who has honed the form
Strong character beats and arcs
Reaching toward one of the author’s biggest canvases yet.
Reference:
Powell, Gareth, Jitterbug, Titan Books, 2026
¹ Which gets into my craw whenever I hear lamentations about the end of Firefly or the possibility of reviving it. Powell’s books are right here, with that dynamic and without the baggage that Firefly has.
² Liu formalized and regularized the hypothesis, that in effect, successful civilizations survive by being as quiet as possible to avoid drawing attention to themselves by rapacious interstellar polities and agents. Greg Bear goes in for this in the Forge of God series, whose universe is most definitely in this mode. Even earlier than Bear, the Berserkers of Fred Saberhagen’s novels and stories are an earlier version still of this idea—you keep yourself hidden and away from genocidal interstellar polities. The Mass Effect, and earlier, the Star Control video game series explore it, too.
