A lighter SF adventure featuring a likeable “average guy” hero readers will want to spend time with.
Murrell’s SF novel follows a newly commissioned officer in an elite military organization known as The Astro Alliance.
In the far-off future year of 4021, Joe Odoemene is on the eve of his graduation from “The Academy,” a training school for soldiers joining the Astro Alliance. The mood is celebratory, as the Alliance is a mere five weeks from a tenuous peace accord with the Camelons, a faction with whom they’ve been warring since before any of the new recruits can remember. Joe is thrilled about his first assignment: He will pilot the Falcon Luck, a respectable ship whose main tasks are to discover and catalogue useful rare elements from previously unexplored planets. Joe is all too happy to let the other “sapients”—his fellow humanoid Academy graduates—do the dangerous work while he hangs back working on scientific matters. Though Joe is a fairly average recruit, he does manage to break a longstanding record in a training exercise previously held by the highly lauded Capt. Kirpicsiskway. At graduation, Joe learns that Kirpicsiskway has changed his commission. Instead of piloting the Falcon Luck—where he would be with his buddies Billy and Harrison—Joe will serve as the “senior helmssape” of Kirpicsiskway’s own ship, the Crowntrotter. While the commission is surprising and prestigious, Joe soon learns it’s not all it’s cracked up to be; he becomes a glorified errand boy, and an incompetent one at that. It’s an adventure story, though, so this otherwise “average Joe” will soon be put to the test, whether he is ready or not. Murrell deserves credit for focusing on a “normal” hero who is decidedly not elite, and his rendering of an employee with a difficult boss will feel relatable to anyone who has spent time in an office: “The captain didn’t have his usual smile. Joe’s stomach tumbled and grumbled. He took slow steps toward the office, as if they could do anything to delay the inevitable.” Readers looking for “hard” SF may wish to keep searching, but those angling for a futuristic take on an ordinary-person-thrust-into-extraordinary-circumstances narrative will happily follow Joe Odoemene to the far reaches of the galaxy.
A lighter SF adventure featuring a likeable “average guy” hero readers will want to spend time with.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9798302438775
Page Count: 503
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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