BOLDLY GO

A trip to the International Space Station turns out to be only the first step for a trio of teenage space travelers.

Along with not being the Star Trek spinoff its title might suggest, this sequel to 2021’s Houston, Is There a Problem? is less a novel than an informational tour of duty aboard the space station with a perfunctory gloss of wish fulfillment. Picking up where his opener left off, Walters takes 14-year-old overachievers Houston Williams and Ashley Ling through liftoff and orbital maneuvers to the station (Teal St. Jermaine, the third member of the teen team, joins them later), and then on to weeks of routine tasks, question-and-answer sessions with schools and other earthbound audiences, and simulated practice flights for an upcoming mission to Mars that they are supposedly not going on. Of course, they do go, thanks to a massive contrivance—but not before readers get a full picture of life in space, from toilets (“basically sitting on a vacuum cleaner and hoping for the best”) to tech talk (“although it’s commonly called a spacewalk, we call it an EVA, which is a short form for extravehicular activity”). The author slyly slips a minor character named Jean-Luc into a cast that, except for Ashley (whose surname cues Chinese heritage), is all White-presenting, and sets up Volume 3 with a sudden, massive shipboard disaster on the way to the red planet.

A thoroughly predictable trek with an unwieldy payload of space facts.