A satisfying series spinoff that suggests it takes a space-village to raise a child.
On a struggling human-colonized planet in the 22nd century, a puzzling death complicates local political machinations.
Alexander’s SF yarn is a sideways sequel to his Murder Under Another Sun (2022), part of the Leif the Lucky series. Heaven is the name of one of Earth’s few colonized planets—a temperate world that can tentatively support human life, though it’s missing a few key nutrients (“the high concentration of carbon dioxide in the air played tricks with a human’s mind”). An international expedition of settlers on Heaven included a restless mix of fortune-seekers, scientists, idealists, scoundrels, and paroled criminals. No new supply ships have arrived for many years (readers of the series know that after widespread cyber-warfare, the Earth has backslid into primitivism), and the few hundred colonists struggle with limited resources, internal division, and resentments over their quasi-socialist economic system. A fresh generation of colonial children is similarly unruly—after a drug-fueled evening, one teenage boy is found dead, cause unknown. Thorny, a smart but temperamental and unpopular girl (whose father is a notorious former assassin with unique access to the colony’s supply of guns), was the last in his company, and she flees the settlement in a rare powered vehicle. Her classmate Danijel, secretly her ardent admirer, protectively follows Thorny to the planet’s unexplored south. Meanwhile, unscrupulous adults mobilize into factions to exploit the drama for their own agendas in advance of a looming election. Alexander’s slow-burning, assured storytelling nicely hybridizes elements of SF, coming-of-age YA narratives, and police procedurals. Many readers may be reminded of the dynamics of Wild West literature as the isolated frontier society of Heaven wrestles with questions of justice, intolerance, self-rule, and revenge. The author’s longstanding thematic elements will resonate as the amoral and the ambitious exploit their minions (at least one villain has Trump-like attributes) and play their psychological games as a precious few try to behave morally and ethically. The narrative also effectively drives home the point that raising teenagers can be just as dicey as fighting off an insurrection.
A satisfying series spinoff that suggests it takes a space-village to raise a child.Pub Date: April 5, 2026
ISBN: 9798990585348
Page Count: 406
Publisher: Alton Kremer
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.
Weir’s latest is a page-turning interstellar thrill ride that follows a junior high school teacher–turned–reluctant astronaut at the center of a desperate mission to save humankind from a looming extinction event.
Ryland Grace was a once-promising molecular biologist who wrote a controversial academic paper contesting the assumption that life requires liquid water. Now disgraced, he works as a junior high science teacher in San Francisco. His previous theories, however, make him the perfect researcher for a multinational task force that's trying to understand how and why the sun is suddenly dimming at an alarming rate. A barely detectable line of light that rises from the sun’s north pole and curves toward Venus is inexplicably draining the star of power. According to scientists, an “instant ice age” is all but inevitable within a few decades. All the other stars in proximity to the sun seem to be suffering with the same affliction—except Tau Ceti. An unwilling last-minute replacement as part of a three-person mission heading to Tau Ceti in hopes of finding an answer, Ryland finds himself awakening from an induced coma on the spaceship with two dead crewmates and a spotty memory. With time running out for humankind, he discovers an alien spacecraft in the vicinity of his ship with a strange traveler on a similar quest. Although hard scientific speculation fuels the storyline, the real power lies in the many jaw-dropping plot twists, the relentless tension, and the extraordinary dynamic between Ryland and the alien (whom he nicknames Rocky because of its carapace of oxidized minerals and metallic alloy bones). Readers may find themselves consuming this emotionally intense and thematically profound novel in one stay-up-all-night-until-your-eyes-bleed sitting.
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13520-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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