Mike Stellar: Nerves of Steel could have been boring. Our hero is 14 year old Mike Stellar whose biggest concern is keeping out of the detention clutches of teacher Mrs. Halebopp – right until he hears at dinnertime his family is moving to Mars. Tomorrow.
Sound like something you have read before? Do you think the author must have ordered stock characters A, B, N and Q, settings C and D, plots 1 and 6? A 2013 novel version of The Jetsons? Instead of being a rehash of sad old plots and characters this was fast, fun and interesting.
Characters
The kids in Mike Stellar are Mike and Larc with Mike’s best friend Stinky mostly a voice at the end of the forbidden phone. Mike is smart, gets into trouble and is terribly afraid that his parents have sabotaged the ship.
Larc turns out to be a most unusual girl and makes friends with Mike. Together they foil the bad guys, rescue the previous expedition and uncover the real guilty people.
Don’t these sound like the stock characters in any teen aged science fiction story? True, they are not unique but the way they work together and how the characters handle conflict and fear make them three-dimensional and a lot of fun.
The adults are shown from Mike’s viewpoint and are not as well-developed as the kids, but we still get enough to see them as people instead of characters you can order off the menu. The creepy Leslie Sugahbert (aka Sugar Bear) is one of those ever-smiling get-you-later types that Mike instantly distrusts. He is proven right when Leslie (a guy by the way) turns out to be spying on Mike’s Mom.
Plot
The plot is a little more complicated than some YA novels, with terraforming gone amok, a missing expedition that isn’t missing, just shoved aside, corporate politics (thankfully in the background), multiple sides and goals, and e e cummings poetry.
Overall it is a lot of fun, even for adults. There are the usual “a miracle occurs here” moments that would be more noticeable in an adult novel. For example, it’s incredible that a robot would have a critical power connector that could be shorted out by contact with a sweaty hand. And it’s even stranger that we’d be terraforming planets in other solar systems before we visit Mars. These are small things though.
What I was glad to NOT see were kids acting like wise grown ups. Kids acting like kids are a lot more fun to read about than kids that act more adult than any adults I know.
Summary
Mike Stellar: Nerves of Steel is anything but boring. There is a little coming-of-age going on (he is 14 after all) but mostly the story moves. It is a fun read. I looked for more by the author but found only a zombie novel in Haiku. It might be good too, who knows.
4 Stars
Leave a Reply