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Narration
Paul Heitsch does an excellent job with this book. His character voices are unique and identifiable. His pacing is great. I have no complaints.
Basic Summary
Jain wakes up to find himself floating in the void of space with little to no memories, oh and he’s also spaceship. There are other ships out there, all dormant and in free fall in some unknown system. Jain and the others make repairs, search the system they are in, and try to put together who they are and what they were supposed to be doing, but they aren’t alone. After surviving a few encounters with an alien vessel the group manages to return to human controlled space only to find they are too late.
The Good
Writing is good. The world in interesting and unique. The characters interact in a mostly realistic way. I love the concept of starships being fully A.I. or in this case, run by scanned in humans, it makes sense as the engineering of vessels would be drastically easier without the vulnerable organic bits. Unlike other science fiction I’ve read, the space battles have a lot more tactics involved.
The Bad
The author doesn’t understand geostationary orbit. The characters sit in geostationary orbit over a tidally locked moon, a moon sits in geostationary orbit over a tidally locked planet, there is a place specified as “High” geostationary orbit. The author seems to do a great job with a lot of science stuff, but this is one major flaw. I’m also not sure I like the “Alien Tech” side of the story. It gets into a science-magic type thing. One of the characters can teleport, another has invisibility, another has a portable shield thingy, and probably the worst is the black whole gun. The whole thing seems kind of video game like.
The Interesting
Not just space battles. The use of drones to do urban combat and repel boarders in the narrow corridors of the ships is awesome. This should be a video game, or at least in more novels.
Final Thoughts
It’s a great science fiction space based book. It manages to cram space battles, mystery, alien encounters, and some unique takes on the future of space colonization into a well written story.
Review by rcdaviswrites, 12/07/2019