S.J. Klapecki - Station Six

Rarely does science fiction address the lives of ordinary people. Station Six is different. Set in a space station "60 million miles" from Earth, it looks at what happens to a group of workers when their jobs are under threat. Normally readers of novels set on space stations might imagine glistening white corridors, alien spacecraft arriving to make first contact and stories driven by (usually) male heroes. Station Six dispenses with all this fantasy and asks instead, what happens to workers in the future when their livelihoods are threatened by corporate plans to maximise profits? The answer is that they fight back.

The novel opens with Max. Hungry and broke they are heading their job working on Station Six's docking bay. Max is managed by the sort of middle manager whose corporate speak and fake inspiration will be familiar to anyone whose ever had any sort of dead-end job. The job is not exciting, or space age - it is boring and repetitive, and the workers never make enough to pay off their debt to the company. As a result Max, with his buddies, goof off and mess about - finding ways to evade the high-tech monitoring systems. But Max has other ways of coping - a side-line in hacking the body mods of their fellow workers to get around costly software updates and they also hope to get involved in the anarchist resistance and union movements. It is their skills in this arena that mean they are drawn into the heart of the fight back.

When corporate announce that Station Six is going to be converted into a luxury holiday resort, and the workers' will lose their jobs, a strike breaks out and Max finds themselves central to the movement that will hopefully win change. Klapecki does well to show how future technological advances won't automatically benefit working people - here spaceflight, body mods and other marvels haven't liberated anyone - instead they've become yet another way of trapping people into the corporate drive to accumulate wealth for the rich. There's a great scene in the book when Max and some of their fellow radicals break into an area of the space station reserved for the super-rich. It is filled with luxury and evidence of a relaxing lifestyle, an alien environment - but one that is supposed to be available to everyone who works hard for the machine.

But I felt that Klapecki's depiction of the resistance itself did not quite work. Too rapidly it became the story of a few key individuals whose actions would help the rest of the strikers liberate themselves. I was more interested in the depictions of how the strike liberated individuals and allowed ordinary people to being to distribute the fruits of their own labour collectively. The bar where beer was free, and the coffee machines hacked to dispense drinks to anyone who wanted one. That side of the collective struggle was more exciting than the militarised action that focused on Max and his compatriots evasion of the corporate security systems.

That said, Station Six is a fun and unusual novel. The author's use of non-binary language and their inclusion of LGBT+ characters is important, as is their willingness to depict the lives and struggles of working people. I particularly liked the way that Max's own anxieties are integrated into the story of the rebellion. Revolutionaries and strikers are rarely heroes - everyone always worries and second guesses themselves. It was nice to see this drawn out. Sadly it all ended far too quickly - I would have liked to know what happened next to the Station Six Commune.

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