A fast-paced and fun adventure beyond the stars.
In Gurgu’s SF novel, a team of interstellar outcasts on the run from the Imperium crosses paths with an ancient evil from deep in Earth’s Carpathian Mountains.
Toshi Hunter and the ragtag crew of the spaceship Pandora already have a lot on their plates by the time they first encounter a dead ship full of metamorphic monstrosities tumbling through space. Players of the classic 2008 Dead Space video game will no doubt instantly recognize the kind of gruesome scene Toshi and company find. It would be a galaxy-class understatement to say that it’s the last thing the beleaguered crew needs at this point. They’re tired of being on the run, because the Imperium has branded them, as members of the Free the Galaxy organization, as terrorists. Years of tossing intergalactic monkey wrenches into the Imperium’s never-ending plans to terraform the universe have taken a serious toll on them all, and Toshi himself is pondering retirement. The Imperium’s version of Manifest Destiny, however, is just as mean and genocidal as the 19th-century variety, because it, too, is lethal to indigenous communities, and despite the trials and sacrifices, the Pandora’s crew remains determined to fight it: “Every planet the humans had colonized had been terraformed, its ecosystem destroyed and brought to Earth standards,” notes the third-person narration. “Humanity was like a plague, burning through the galaxy.” It’s true that the politics of Gurgu’s novel couldn’t be more overt. That said, the galloping, guns-blazing nature of the power-packed prose makes this space opera seem more pulpy than political. The text has a tendency toward gruesomeness in places: “Its upper body looked human, but its legs were insectlike and its head was shredded, as though something with huge mandibles had chewed on it.” Overall, the author has a keen knack for mixing and melding SF and the supernatural in all kinds of intriguing ways. Clear allusions to vampirism would be too obvious; Gurgu opts instead for more obscure archetypes: When was the last time one read about a wendigo in outer space?
A fast-paced and fun adventure beyond the stars.Pub Date: April 30, 2026
ISBN: 9781738659388
Page Count: 303
Publisher: Kult Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.
When a bunch of corporate assholes mark their planet for destruction, a garage band of colonists must defend their home world with the power of rock.
Slightly sidestepping his frenetic litRPG—literary role-playing game—doorstoppers, here Dinniman takes on capitalism, propaganda, xenophobia, and violence as entertainment. Thankfully for readers, it’s all wrapped in the usual profane, adolescent humor, and SF readers will have a ball. A couple of hundred years after they left Earth, the inhabitants of the interstellar colony of New Sonora weren’t expecting much in the way of new threats, especially after a mysterious illness killed almost everyone between the ages of 30 and 60. That disaster left only the young and the old on the populated planet, where farming is enabled by highly accelerated AI and people are generally cool with each other. But when drummer Oliver Lewis stumbles across a foul-mouthed killer mech piloted by a child, he realizes that something’s definitely fishy. Earth, it seems, has classified the New Sonorans as non-human and scheduled their destruction as a paid, five-day combat game. Apex Industries, led by lead mercenary Eli Opel, has reverse-engineered Ender’s Game and is turning loose its players with real bullets and bombs on the population of New Sonora. The resistance is a weird bunch, led by proto-slacker Oliver; his little sister, Lulu; and his ex-girlfriend, documentary filmmaker and burgeoning revolutionary Rosita Zapatero, as well as the other members of Oliver’s band, the Rhythm Mafia. Thankfully, they also have Roger, the last functioning AI on the planet, though Oliver’s grandfather permanently programmed it to nannybot mode as a dying joke. Call the book overlong—the battle scenes often feel like watching someone play a videogame—but the humor and the execution are cutting without being mean and there’s almost always a point.
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9780593820308
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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