In Adams’ SF novel, a mission to Mars doesn’t go smoothly.

As the novel opens, Cmdr. Kate Holman is anxious but quietly elated to command the Ares mission, which will bring a crew to the surface of Mars for the first time in history. Holman is coming off a rocky mission to Earth’s moon a few years ago and is eager to prove herself, but on the very eve of landing, she receives a shock. A video from Assistant Director Richard Pearson of NASA informs her that once on the red planet, command of the mission will fall to Security Chief Julian Grimes who, along with Mission Specialist Joseph Cheney, has been briefed on the true, classified mission of the Ares project. Holman and the rest of the crew are outraged as Grimes marches them to the Habitat at Ares Base and then disappears to conduct his secret mission, leaving them to speculate among themselves as a huge Martian storm closes in. When a crisis erupts, Holman and the others are forced to use their evacuation rocket Gaia to flee the planet, eventually finding themselves making an emergency landing on Earth’s moon, where an encounter with armed, black-garbed figures appears to spell a different and more ominous kind of danger. Adams unfolds this by-the-numbers plot at a measured pace that’s thoughtful and never dull, and although there is a disappointingly one-dimensional villain, the rest of the cast (Holman; her close friend and second in command, Glenn Wiles, and the mission’s civilian passenger, Dr. Fisk) is uniformly well drawn; Holman’s competence and fierce determination are well balanced with her insecurities (Adams draws neat parallel between her earlier mission screwup on the moon and her later expert landing of Gaia there, for instance), and the story’s suspense is always carefully, steadily enhanced by subsequent plot twists.

An involving, solidly constructed tour of Earth’s solar system.

Adams offers a futuristic debut novel in which people battle robots for a substance that could be used for cataclysmic purposes.

In 2330, the human race is at odds with “aughts”—robots who’ve won their independence from human control. An aught ship is undertaking a trip to the center of the galaxy, where powerful and deadly material called Planck Matter is plentiful. That ship, in turn, is being chased by the human-led Avenger,and the very future of humankind is at stake. This setup is the catalyst for a sweeping adventure that sends the humans toward a space-deforming black hole. Adams’ dialogue and descriptions are remarkably thorough. However, they ultimately provide readers with too much unimportant detail. Capt. Thomas Holbrook of the Avenger, for instance, is described as stroking his chin no less than 20 times. Overall, the novel’s main characters—Holbrook, his right-hand man Cmdr. Paul Stephens, and Rebekah Riesen, a world-renowned scientist aboard the Avenger—feel underdeveloped. Through flashbacks, readers do get a taste of Holbrook’s troubled childhood, but it’s not enough for readers to truly understand his motives. A stronger edit might have allowed for a greater focus on the space-battle action scenes: “Holbrook tapped furiously at the viewscreen, rolling the craft to port. The first blast grazed its underside, scraping an ugly dark gash along its smooth white exterior. Blue-green sparks sputtered from the shuttle’s aft.” As it is, however, characters spend pages in conversation that could have been summed up in a paragraph or two; one nine-page segment focuses solely on an aptitude test, and at another point, it takes two pages for Holbrook and Stephens to figure out they’ve been duped into a meeting to takes them away from their priorities.

A wide-ranging but overly dense SF thriller.