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
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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