A promising but awkwardly executed speculative thriller.
An enormous space station is under threat in Pollet’s SF thriller.
John Desmond, a former U.S. Navy fighter pilot in the year 2150, loses his beloved wife, Isabella, in a car accident. After three years of feeling lost, John decides to move to the space station Stargraber, a planet-sized hub for the world’s brightest and wealthiest: a launch point for space colonization and a means to find new solar and radiation-based energy sources. After a suspicious explosion on the station, John begins to suspect that someone’s looking to sabotage it. Sharing his suspicions is Victoria Palmers, owner of a mining concession in New Mexico, who’s been tapped to help evaluate Stargraber’s Martian mining equipment. She overhears another concession owner talking about a conspiracy to take Stargraber down, and she knows she has to act. Luckily, Victoria already has an appointment on the station the next day to talk about Martian mining. Her guide, when she arrives, is none other than John. They soon team up to figure out who around them is an ally or a traitor without drawing attention—and put a stop to the plan before it’s too late. Pollet offers some clever one-liners and observations (about motorcycles: “man started on all fours and ended up on two wheels”), as well as some action and moments of tension that some readers will appreciate. The massive space station setting is an intriguing idea with a lot of potential, but the book does little with the concept, instead focusing on a choppy thriller plot. Lengthy descriptions sometimes appear in awkward places and have a deflating effect. Victoria is a competent and intelligent hero, but male characters mainly focus on her attractiveness; meanwhile, characters deemed overweight are perceived as devious, foolish, and suspect.
A promising but awkwardly executed speculative thriller.Pub Date: May 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781967963225
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An adventurous departure for a well-loved romance author.
Moby Dick, but make it queer SF.
“Call me…call me whatever the fuck you like.” This is the first line of Hall’s latest, and you don’t have to have a master’s degree in American Lit to get the reference. Melville’s magnum opus is one of those cultural artifacts that’s embedded itself in the popular consciousness even if only in its most basic form. Hall, however, isn’t messing around in their reimagining of Moby Dick. In this rather long novel, the author is doggedly faithful to the original text—or as faithful as they can be given that this story is narrated by a queer woman, set in the distant future, and takes place in outer space. Like Melville’s Ishmael, Hall’s protagonist signs on with a ship called the Pequod seeking escape from a conservative background. Unlike Melville’s Ishmael, Hall’s protagonist has sexual relationships that are textual rather than subtextual and also pretty hot. The worldbuilding is strong and—as is the case in the most resonant science fiction—disturbingly plausible. This story is set in a time long after Earth has been stripped of its resources. Humans have scattered throughout the solar system and reorganized into Extraction States and Pharma States. The Aphrodite Pharma State owns every part of the narrator’s body that’s been restored or replaced. The Olympus Extraction State owns the Pequod and claims most of its crew’s profits as they brave the storms of Jupiter in search of the massive creatures hunted for the cerebrospinal fluid that fuels human existence. Hall’s breakout book was Boyfriend Material (2020) and, since then, the author has published a number of wildly popular novels that range from contemporary romcom to romantasy. Readers who loved Mortal Follies (2023) or A Lady for a Duke (2022) may not find what they want from Hall here. That said, readers who appreciate a good old-fashioned space yarn will find a lot to like.
An adventurous departure for a well-loved romance author.Pub Date: March 10, 2026
ISBN: 9781250394958
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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