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
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 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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