DUSTED BY STARS

A courier takes on more than she bargained for when she accepts a gig transporting an alien relic through hostile space in Matiasz’s SF novel.

In a spacegoing future, earthlings are regarded by various alien species as violent, verminous upstarts whose greed ruined their home world and botched attempts to terraform Mars and Venus. Many feel that Homo sapiens, or “Gaians,” as they’re known, have no right to be zooming among the stars; nonetheless, many Gaians work throughout the galaxy as mercenaries and criminals. Stacey Jones, a Gaian, grew up in a Mars colony and self-identifies as a proud, socialist Martian, but despite her politics, her services as a transport-courier are still for sale. Desperate for cash, she takes a seemingly easy assignment to ferry an ancient artifact to Kapala, a planet maintained as a sort of shrine to the mysterious Progenitor civilization, which seeded life throughout the cosmos. The cuplike item, called a “sangrael,” turns out to be an archetypal relic that’s featured in numerous Terran legends, including that of the Holy Grail, but its curator—the mysterious part-cyborg Medea—assures Stacey that the object is harmless on its own. However, heavily armed attackers from all over known space (including other Gaians) soon converge on the tiny expedition. What kind of task has she really taken on? Matiasz delivers a flighty space-opera adventure in a compact package that has the feel of a teen-oriented chapter book or comic-book tale—a feeling that’s further cemented by the inclusion of Hunt’s flavorful black-and-white illustrations. It offers shoutouts to such SF pioneers as Larry Niven, Olaf Stapledon, and even Edgar Rice Burroughs. The text, narrated by the determined Stacey, packs a lot of information into a small space—it’s a virtual singularity, one might say—but it doesn’t stop it from snapping into action-packed fight scenes in the blink of an eye. There’s not a lot of character development, though, and an asteroid-field of subplots remains in orbit at the end.

A brisk, if occasionally uneven, yarn that will still appeal to old and young space-action fans.