In a universe of knuckleheads, two even bigger knuckleheads attempt the heist of the century. But first, they must survive each other.
Devon Eriksen’s Theft of Fire was acclaimed by many influencers. It survived a cancellation attempt. The author himself was hailed as the next Heinlein. I wanted to like this book. But as I read it, a thought surfaced over and over again:
Everyone is a knucklehead.
Micro-Scale Goodness
Eriksen is a good author. He even has the potential for greatness. I can see why so many people love Theft of Fire.
He has clearly made a study of the craft. He understands plot, structure, pacing, conflict and characters. He shows his research throughout the book. The action is brisk and compelling, interspaced with slower moments for characterisation and deeper developments.
The key highlight of the book is the tension between the main characters. Marcus Warnoc is a space miner saddled with humongous debts. He reluctantly turns to piracy to keep himself afloat. Miranda Foxgrove tracks him down and coerces him into going along with a scheme that would alter the course of human history forever.
Both characters are immensely flawed. Marcus is a tough Belter who isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty… unless he comes up against his own code of ethics. Miranda is an insufferable diva who knows what she wants and will use everything she has at her disposal to get it.
The plot pits their rough edges against each other, over and over and over again. All throughout the story, they confront the worst of each other, and themselves. This drama is the heart of the story, with both characters learning to work with each other despite themselves.
The first half of the story is the set-up for the titular theft of fire. The second half is jam-packed with action sequences worthy of a space opera. Eriksen writes his combat with equal aplomb, capturing the tension, fear, and exhilaration at the knife’s edge dividing life and death.
Eriksen is both skilled and talented. Every individual scene is well-done. The characters are larger than life, befitting the scope of the overarching story, and simultaneously believable. For a first-time author, the prose is polished. I can see why so people love his work.
The catch is, the story only works at the small scale.
A Matter of Language
Eriksen, like so many authors around him, tries to build out the world by injecting counterfactual terms into modern-day phrases. Instead of ‘pennies to the dollar’, there is ‘mils to the bitcoin’; instead of ‘Oh God!”, people say “Oh, gods!”. This is conlang construction at the small scale, and symptomatic of the wider issues with the story.
This syntax is profoundly unnatural. Language does not evolve this way. When new terms become embedded in mainstream consciousness, they do not take the place of old terms. An entirely new syntax grows around them.
I live in Singapore. If there’s any modern-day culture that would say “Oh, gods!”, it’s here, with multiple polytheistic cultures living side by side. But people never say “‘”Oh, gods!”. Only “oh God!”, in English. If they were speaking in their mother tongue, be it Mandarin or Tamil or something else, they would utter an exclamation related to their culture. Not an adaptation of English.
Likewise, over the course of my life, I have seen and tracked the evolution of Singlish. New terms emerged and old ones faded away. People did not inject new words in the place of old ones. They created new phrases, new vocabular, new grammar, to accommodate them.
Whenever I see such syntactical substitutions, it is jarring. It is a sign that these phrases were chosen not to create a sense of a future society, but to write to a modern-day reader. A very specific kind of reader, at that.
Unnatural phrases like these are just the tip of the iceberg. Go deeper and you’ll see even worse issues.
Knucklehead Meet Knucklehead
“No one ever thinks to look up.”
A simple, seemingly throwaway line in the first chapter that explains why Marcus didn’t see the security drones escorting Miranda.
Then I thought about it some more.
The story is set in the twenty-second century. Humanity has established colonies across the solar system. There are cultures based entirely in space, with intimate knowledge and experience of microgravity environments. Marcus came from such a culture.
So why didn’t he look up?
Marcus is both a space miner and a spaceship pilot. Operating safely in outer space demands constant attention and situational awareness. When you wear a spacesuit in hard vacuum, you cannot hear, smell or taste anything outside the suit. This means the only way to detect a hazard is to see it. In a microgravity environment, hazards can be anywhere.
Including up.
It stands to reason that people used to operating in high-risk microgravity environments would be trained to scan in all directions. Including up. Only those who live and work in a gravity well—such as Eriksen—would not instinctively look up. This statement doesn’t make sense.
Why am I harping on this single line? Because this line undermines the character of Marcus Warnoc—and other spacers he encounters in a high-stakes situation. And because we see this same pattern throughout the story: a single, seemingly-inconsequential line undermining the characters and plot.
In the first chapter, we learn that Marcus is an infamous space pirate responsible for a string of brazen thefts. Miranda discovers his identity and blackmails him into helping her with her own theft. And how did she find him?
Marcus’ ship comes with tracking software. Software that could place him at the locations of his thefts. Software that he himself wasn’t aware of, even though it was stated in his contract.
Marcus Warnoc is supposedly a hotshot pirate who executed a string of heists without anyone discovering who he is. He is also a knucklehead who didn’t realise his own ship was being tracked, and didn’t take measures to prevent himself from being tracked.
But that’s okay, because the bounty hunters of his setting are knuckleheads who didn’t think to do something as simple as looking up records either.
It falls to Miranda, an arrogant know-it-all, to think of something so obvious and follow up on it. And to confront this notorious bandit and rope him along into a universe-altering heist, she brings all of two security drones.
When Marcus’ history is revealed later, it boggles the mind to think that she believed a mere two drones are enough. Especially since she didn’t bother keeping him under constant supervision. Sure, she cooks up excuses as to why she didn’t bring a full executive protection team, but it boils down to this:
She’s a knucklehead with too much confidence in her too-limited abilities.
Both characters are highly flawed. This, in of itself, is not a bad thing. This fuels the drama throughout the story. But when you think more deeply about these flaws, you realise that they undercut the characters and the story itself.
Marcus Warnoc is either a professional thief or a knucklehead who bit off more than he could chew. As the story progresses, the latter interpretation begins to take hold. This, again, is not a bad thing, until you hit the 70% mark of the story.
Marcus is a thief. That means he steals stuff and sells them. He knows more about thievery than Miranda. The journey to their destination takes weeks, plenty of time for them to hash out their plan in detail. This means a primary plan, a backup plan, and a backup to the backup. At a minimum.
The target of their heist is located at a heavily-guarded celestial body. It is reasonable to assume that they would be detected at some point. Professionals would have plans for that. Including a plan for escaping and evading pursuit, and surviving long enough to sell their ill-gotten gains.
Spoiler: there is no plan.
It sets up a plot twist, but at the expense of believability. Marcus is supposed to be an experienced thief. In his previous heists, it would be logical to assume that he would have a plan to sell his loot somewhere. Yet in this heist, there is no plan. He is assuming that Miranda has a plan to dispose of the loot. Yet this is the second-most important aspect of the heist, an aspect he himself should be intimately familiar with. He has a vested interest in ensuring that that he would receive his share of the proceeds, which means that logically, he should have hashed out this portion of the plan during the long flight.
Since he didn’t, he isn’t anywhere the professional he is made out to be.
Marcus Warnoc is simultaneously an experienced thief and a civilian who doesn’t know how to commit a crime and get away with it. In other words, he is a knucklehead who survived for so long only because he robbed other knuckleheads.
As for Miranda, she is an even bigger knucklehead. As she discloses near the end of the book, she should simply have approached Marcus with a contract. She could have offered to hire him for the heist of the century in exchange for wiping out his debts and cutting him into the deal. That is what a professional would do.
But she is a knucklehead, so she insists on knuckling him under and forcing him to go along with her schemes.
This single act and its consequences account for forty percent of the plot. The entire story could be cut in half simply by her offering him a contract in the first chapter instead of taking his ship by force. Without this catalysing incident, Theft of Fire would not exist in its current form.
Not only that, she is such an incompetent, insufferable diva that the only reason she survived the story is because Marcus is too soft to kill her even though she is dragging them both into what he himself acknowledges is a suicide mission.
Why are these issues bad? After all, the drama drives the story. If you keep your focus small, limit your focus to individual scenes and chapters, it’s not a problem.
I, however, read a story at the micro and the macro scale. Once I realised what was going on with the characters, and what it meant for the plot, I looked at the worldbuilding. Then I came to a startling conclusion:
The worldbuilding makes Theft of Fire impossible.
Universe of Knuckleheads
As a work of science fiction, Theft of Fire is as hard as The Expanse.
However, the authors of The Expanse freely admit that they only incorporate realistic science if it heightens the drama. That is how we have stealth ships, alien mutagens, and other non-hard science fiction elements throughout the series.
Theft of Fire clearly follows this playbook. Where science is integral to the plot, it is reasonably well-researched without being intrusive. Where science is inconvenient to the plot, it is ignored.
It has to be this way, because the titular heist could not take place in a setting that completely respects science.
No Stealth in Space
Marcus evaded capture for so long because he carefully times his engine burns. The sensors of his setting can pick up rockets when they fire, but after they cool, the ship is invisible. He sets up his burns well in advance and coasts to his destination.
Simple. Elegant. And it won’t work in our universe.
Spacecraft produce heat. Heat is necessary to keep human crew alive. This heat must be radiated out into space or the crew will be cooked alive. A spacecraft can be detected by its radiators from tens of millions of kilometres out.
As Atomic Rockets is fond of saying: there ain’t no stealth in space.
This makes the entire plot impossible, so to appreciate the story,
Even if we concede that the sensors of the setting aren’t capable of picking up radiators, security specialists across orbital space would surely recognise this vulnerability. It is their job to prevent people like Marcus Warnoc from stealing their clients’ property.
They would counter this tactic by seeding areas of interest with long-range sensors, capable of picking up distant engine burns and detecting incoming vessels using radar, lidar or other sensors. Which means, once again, stealth is difficult if not outright impossible.
Because they didn’t do this—even for the most heavily-guarded celestial body in the Solar system—it is reasonable to assume that the entire security industry is staffed by knuckleheads.
‘No One Has Any Warships’
Worldbuilding in Theft of Fire is delivered primarily through declarative sentences and short paragraphs. In other stories, these lines would simply add colour to the setting. But in this book, the worldbuilding undermines the story itself.
Here’s an example: ‘No one has any warships’.
Eriksen is a libertarian. In this declaration, his politics bleed into the story, with Miranda explaining exactly why there are no warships any more. At the heart of this assumption is that warships exist to protect profits. When there is no potential to gain profits, the warships were all decommissioned.
This almost sounds reasonable, until you take this into consideration:
The Starlight Coalition holds a monopoly on nuclear fusion drives. The secret to that monopoly is held at the location of the heist. If wars were fought to gain and defend profit, then why won’t the Starlight Coalition maintain a fleet of warships to defend the source of their profits? Especially since no one else has any? Warships may not be inherently profitable, but they pay for themselves when people like Marcus and Miranda show up.
But let’s just say this is a peaceful setting where war is almost forgotten and the directors of the Starlight Coalition have decided ordinary ships are sufficient. Even then, there is one small problem:
Everyone is armed.
Rick Robinson’s First Law of Space Combat states, ‘an object impacting at 3 km/sec delivers kinetic energy equal to its mass in TNT’. This is a setting where spacecraft and other space objects routinely meet and exceed that velocity. Which means space is filled with dangerous objects moving at high speed.
An early sequence demonstrates this. A rogue spacecraft is on a collision trajectory with a space habitat. When the spacecraft cannot be stopped, the habitat blows it apart with mass drivers.
So warships are too expensive to maintain, but habitat-mounted mass drivers are essential for defence. Does this make sense?
No. Because an armed ship can loose a cloud of kinetic slugs at a station and scoot away. The station would have to pray that their mass drivers can intercept the slugs in time… and that the resulting shrapnel cloud won’t shred the station anyway.
The only defence against this is a fleet of armed vessels capable of intercepting the hostile ship and incoming projectiles far away from the station. In other words, warships.
It’s easy to arm ships in space, especially in the universe of Theft of Fire. A mass driver for mining and cargo transport can be turned into a cannon. A rocket that be used for propelling cargo across planetary orbits can be easily repurposed for a missile. In an environment where everyone is armed, the only way to ensure your security is to be well-armed yourself.
Especially since everyone in this setting has weapons of mass destruction.
‘Percentage of Lightspeed’
During a combat sequence, Marcus casually describes his ship’s railgun firing twenty-kilo slugs ‘at an appreciable percentage of lightspeed’.
To be absolutely clear: a ship built by hand using blueprints downloaded from the Internet is capable of firing relativistic slugs.
To put things in perspective, a 20-kg tungsten shell flying at 5% lightspeed generates the equivalent of 5.4 megatons of TNT on impact, greatly exceeding the yield of many modern-day nuclear weapons.
In other words, this is a setting where small groups of people with reasonable amounts of capital can build ships and railguns capable of launching city-busters and planet-killers from halfway across the Solar System!
At such velocities, there is no meaningful way to accurately intercept incoming slugs. If you detect the slug—and in this setting, railgun slugs are invisible to radar—by the time you get a sensor return, the slug would have travelled a significant distance. All you can do is spray interceptors in the rough direction of the incoming slugs, and pray.
In Theft of Fire, there are enough relativistic railguns and slugs in private hands capable of wiping out humanity multiple times over. By some miracle, this hasn’t happened yet. All it takes is one madman with a sufficiently large ship and a number of railguns to doom all of humanity.
Even in the hyper-capitalistic ultra-libertarian setting of the story, it would not be unreasonable to ban civilian ownership of weapons capable of wiping out human civilisation. And the only way to enforce the ban would be armed ships filled with troops. That is, warships.
Failing that, the only defence against a sudden barrage of planet killers is to station railgun-armed ships near concentrations of other armed ships, ready to pre-empt, intercept, and avenge a sudden strike.
In other words, warships.
Plus, to stand a chance of reacting to a first strike, human civilisation would seed inhabited areas with sensors to detect relativistic rounds. These sensors would also serve the purpose of monitoring potentially dangerous asteroids, high-velocity debris, and other space hazards. Being calibrated to detect small, fast-moving masses, they would also be able to detect a spaceship coasting towards a no-fly zone—and prevent the theft of fire.
Quite simply, if the setting respected the ubiquity of planet-killers in private hands, it would organise itself in such a way that the story would not be possible.
Warfare at Relativistic Speeds
As discussed earlier, the second half of Theft of Fire is packed with action scenes. This includes space battles with high-g maneouvres. As with the drama, they work at the micro level. But if you take a step back, the worldbuilding defeats the combat.
Like The Expanse, this setting does not have weaponised lasers. Space battles are fought with missiles and railguns. While this is not wrong in of itself, this requires a vastly different approach to combat.
Marcus’ ship is a torchship. It is capable of accelerating at high gravities over many hours. The drive fuses particle metallic hydrogen into helium. This suggests it uses the proton-proton chain, the process by which stars convert hydrogen into helium to generate immense heat and light. According to Atomic Rockets, this process releases 644.93 TJ/kg, with an exhaust velocity of 11.3% lightspeed.
Missiles in this setting are described as being mostly fuel, running off a particle metallic hydrogen-oxygen reaction. Again, per Atomic Rockets, a metallic hydrogen rocket is calculated to release 216MJ/kg, with an exhaust velocity of 16,700 m/s… or 0.00557% lightspeed.
A brief glimpse at these figures will tell you that the torchship can easily outrun the missiles. The only reason the missiles pose a threat in the first place is because of a very convenient plot event.
In a plausible setting, those missiles would not be used to fight torchships, but to intercept incoming relativistic railgun slugs. Only knuckleheads would try to attack a fast ship with a slow weapon. Battles would be fought primarily with railguns, not missiles.
Marcus had no need to execute the random orbital burns he did in the story to escape the missiles. He just had to point his ship at his destination, fire the drive at max power, then jink back and forth to evade railgun barrages.
Of course, there wouldn’t be any drama in that. So I can understand why Eriksen wrote the combat scenes the way he did. But there is just one problem:
There was no plan. In true knucklehead fashion, Marcus and Miranda had no plan for making off with their loot and surviving the pursuit. That left Marcus randomly maneuvering in space until the duo finally figured out what to do next.
It is easier to forgive shallow worldbuilding than shallow characters.
But the real knuckleheads aren’t Marcus and Miranda. No, they are the rest of the human race.
The Power of the Sun
The Starlight Coalition holds a monopoly on nuclear fusion drives. Those who refuse to use a Starlight drive is ‘stuck using chemical fuel rockets’. For plot purposes, this is almost believable… save for that one sentence about railguns.
If humanity can build railguns capable of propelling a 20-kg tungsten slug at relativistic velocities, then humanity can build railguns capable of propelling tiny slugs at even faster velocities.
Including propelling a metallic projectile at a fusion target at velocities sufficient to initiate nuclear fusion.
This process is called projectile fusion, a variation of inertial confinement fusion. First Light Fusion in the UK demonstrated the viability of this process in 2022. After a century of research, it is quite plausible to scale up this process to build a nuclear fusion drive.
Starlight’s nuclear fusion drive uses black box technology. Therefore, an ICF nuclear rocket would not violate their patents. At most, Starlight can only claim they have the most powerful and efficient nuclear fusion drives. Other players with ICF engines would cater to those who do not want to sign up with Starlight.
There are also other alternatives to nuclear fusion drives. The book casually mentions the presence of nuclear missiles in civilian—or at least non-government—hands. This implies that humanity has the technology to produce nuclear thermal rockets and nuclear pulse propulsion drives. Again, they may not be as powerful as Starlight’s tech, but they are sufficient to get around.
What this means, in so many words, is that Starlight’s black box technology is nowhere near as impactful as it should be in a realistic setting. Like Microsoft or Apple, it would be a large player, but not the only player in town.
Because ICF nuclear fusion drives would be plausible in this setting, it would be plausible for a fleet of warships to challenge the Starlight Coalition’s monopoly on their black box technology. And the only way to deter this is to have a fleet of warships and a constellation of sensors.
Which would make Theft of Fire impossible, because Marcus and Miranda would have been blown away long before arrival.
Homo Knucklehead
When you put all these pieces together, there is only one possible conclusion: the setting of Theft of Fire is populated by knuckleheads who do not understand the technologies they are playing with.
As I mentioned earlier, Theft of Fire is as hard a work of science fiction as The Expanse. Everything that increases drama is diamond-hard, everything that does not is cheerfully ignored.
Technology does not exist in a vacuum, or in isolation from other technologies. Every single piece of technology that exists has second-, third- and fourth-order impacts. Humans will always find ways to work around technological limitations, or repurpose existing technologies.
Great science fiction explores the impact of counterfactual technologies on human society. In so doing, it grants insights into what it means to be human. Theft of Fire only explores the first-order impacts of counterfactual technology. It has to, because if it examines the second- and follow-on order impacts, the story could not exist.
Theft of Fire is not science fiction. It wears the aesthetics of science fiction. But at its core, it is an enemies-to-lovers YA romance.
The Thief of Science Fiction
The story is set in a far-distant human civilisation, but the language reflects 21st century linguistic norms. It injects futuristic and counterfactual terms into current-day syntax to force a connection with a modern-day reader—just like a YA romance.
The heart of the story is the drama between Marcus and Miranda, and how they come to trust each other and confront their personal issues. Every single chapter in the story is built around this drama—just like a YA romance.
Marcus and Miranda carry heavy emotional baggage. This baggage causes them to act out in big, dramatic ways. The reactions to these actions, and the reactions to those reactions, take up a huge portion of the story—just like a YA romance.
The plot exists only to drive this drama. As I discussed earlier, half of the story exists only because Miranda chose to make a knuckleheaded decision, and Miranda herself stays onboard only because Marcus chose not to pre-emptively eliminate her. Had she acted like a professional, or had he removed her, there would be no drama. Without drama, there would be no plot—just like a YA romance.
The worldbuilding is shallow by necessity. Descriptions of the wider universe must be limited to single sentences peppered throughout the manuscript, because exploring the implications in detail would cause the plot to disintegrate. The only purpose of the worldbuilding is to justify the plot—just like a YA romance.
Nothing exists in Theft of Fire beyond the core drama. There is no sense that the universe is populated by real humans with real intelligences and real motivations. There is nothing to indicate there is a real civilisation beyond the pressure hull of the ship, and that Marcus and Miranda are just two humans among many. Arguably, given that the story is written in first person, nothing is real outside of Marcus Warnoc’s perspective. This solipsism is the most defining trait of the book—just like a YA romance.
Fundamentally, Theft of Fire is edgy YA romance billed as science fiction. It has the structure of YA romance, draped in science fiction tropes. Once you recognise the fundamental hollowness of the setting, you cannot unsee it. It works its magic at the level of the scene and the chapter, but when you zoom out to take in the entirety of the story and think about the worldbuilding implications, all you see is the drama and nothing besides.
Would I recommend Theft of Fire? It depends.
If you love character drama, if you are willing to overlook the shallowness of the setting, and you only care about scene-to-scene and chapter-to-chapter events, Theft of Fire makes for compelling reading.
If you are looking for great science fiction, look elsewhere.
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