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The Wrong Stars is a fast-paced space opera structured around the dangerous allure of mysteries. The main characters are perfectly aware that some things are better left alone, untouched, but they can’t help it. Human beings are drawn to the unknown like moths to light: the characters must uncover the many secrets the universe holds even if that means facing massive golden spiders.
The story follows the crew of the White Raven, a small ship captained by Callie Machedo, which is employed by a big space corporation to hunt down pirates and scavengers. One fateful day, they come across an ancient exploration vessel, sent 500 years ago to discover habitable planets, floating in [...]
Written by Suzanne Palmer, Finder is a perfectly fine sci-fi novel that offers an overfamiliar, but, for the most part, well-told story about a cocky smuggler caught in a war when trying to steal a spaceship.
The protagonist, Fergus Ferguson, is actually not called a smuggler, but a finder: a person whose job is to locate certain objects and retrieve them for whoever is paying him. He’s a hulky red-haired man and the type of person who is usually in the wrong place at the wrong time. So, when Ferguson travels to a space colony to steal a ship from a warlord named Gilger, he inadvertently gets inside a cable car with an old woman called Mattie Vahn, who just happens to be on [...]
Part noir, part space opera, Leviathan Wakes is a very good science fiction novel: written by James S. A. Corey, the first volume of The Expanse series manages to successfully balance character development with exciting set-pieces, offering the best of both genres.
The book opens with a young pilot named Juliette Mao, who finds herself trapped after her spacecraft, the Scopuli, is intercepted by pirates. When she finally manages to escape her confinement, however, Mao comes across her captain being swallowed by a mysterious substance, and realizes that her problems are even greater than she had imagined. Meanwhile, in the Asteroid Belt near Jupiter, Detective Miller receives [...]