In Patrick Tomlinson’s Gate Crashers, the author takes the worldbuilding, dry sense of humor and relatable characters of his previous series to a new universe where First Contact has gone far wilder than expected.
The Magellan, state of the art spacecraft for the American-European Union, is thirty light years from our Solar System, the furthest any human spaceship has voyaged into space, in the mid 24th century. More than a half century of travel, the Magellan’s crew is on ice, the AI of the Magellan guiding the ship toward the star it is targeted toward. However, a chance encounter with a stationary alien probe launches humanity into a first contact scenario that it is not prepared for. And, frankly, neither are the aliens.
This is the story of Patrick Tomlinson’s Gate Crashers.
The worldbuilding is more suggestive than deep. We get a sense of what 24th century life on a deep space spacecraft is like, as well as a number of alien races and worlds, but it is not a deep and crunchy dive into these worlds as much. There is a lighter touch to the worldbuilding here than in his somewhat more straightforward Children of a Dead Earth series, but this is not to say that the worldbuilding is deficient, it simply takes a back seat to other concerns and emphases.
The heart of the novel is the central cast of characters and how they are depicted. The author invests a lot of time and energy in his cast, both human and nonhuman. From the Magellan to her crew, to the group of scientists back in the solar system trying to make sense of their discovery, to the aliens themselves, they are a widely described bunch and are done in broad strokes, in bright stripes of character that are appealing to follow the adventures of, even the more antagonistic aliens. The characters really work as archetypes of the kinds of characters you’d meet in a Space Opera, but they never reach the level of parody. I particularly liked D’armic, an alien whose species has to be deliberate about changing their body chemistry in order to feel emotions of any kinds. But really, the novel is not going for subtlety in its characters when, as a space opera, it has a Captain Maximus Tiberius who, indeed, lives up to the middle name of a certain Starfleet officer.
The dry humor and turns of events were a levity that also made the novel an easy read. Dying is easy, comedy is hard. While this is not a comedic novel in the sense of Steven Erikson’s Willful Child or Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the author’s previous work shows an interest in leavening his work with humor, often of the absurdist school. Tomlinson did, after all, put Green Bay cheeseheads into The Ark. That sort of humor is here in Gate Crashers too, from a put-upon AI, to a meathead captain who definitely is showboating and overemphasizing his James Kirk-like attitudes to calculated effect on his part. The clash of misunderstandings, accidents, pratfall humor and situational asides are excellent ingredients in the first contact story that Tomlinson is telling here. His home state of Wisconsin comes in for some more digs, too. The novel itself is not fully a comedy and does not quite seem meant to be, but the comedy is important to the narrative. In this way, a close relative of this, although a completely different medium, would be Howard Tayler’s Schlock Mercenary webcomic. Fans of it will find a lot to love in Gate Crashers, and vice versa.
Would technology and events unfold as rapidly as they do in this novel, in a strictly realistic manner? No, I think events in the novel are a little compressed in the timeline, so that we can get ourselves deeper into the plot and get around some of the limitations of the initial setup. I can mostly forgive this rapidity of technological progress, because reverse engineering and the recklessness of adopting it, without a doubt would not go smoothly and slowly. The author understands how bureaucracies and loose cannon figures within it can make events take unexpected directions. That through line in the novel, both on the human side and on the alien side, felt completely realistic. “This is how it would happen” is something I said to myself while reading it.
With a keen sense of character, worldbuilding, and humor, Gate Crashers is a thoroughly entertaining pleasure that kept me smiling, and turning pages. It is not a life-changing book by any means, but it is a very fun read.
