An imaginative, genre-bending gunslinger tale with a compelling queer protagonist.
After a gunslinging anti-hero winds up in Las Ráfagas—a dying mining town cloaked in the clouds of gas giant Aeolus—she discovers odd disappearances and the shocking truth behind the outpost’s regeneration project in this SF novel.
When a mission gone awry sees a nameless protagonist pursued by the San Juan-Paul Waystation bulls—“law enforcement on the Cygnus Trail”—she is rescued by a kind robot, Maurice, and given temporary shelter with the Vega ranching family. With Tilly—her steed sporting a Faster Than Light engine—needing expensive repairs, she must pick up odd jobs to secure the fuel and money (“rubidium and spoons”) to escape. Assuming the name Gus, the wry gunslinger with a beam-shooting pistol soon learns that lying low won’t be easy in a town where too many things don’t add up: “Strange disappearances. A mining outpost that wasn’t doing any mining.” After a whiskey-fueled night leads to a bar brawl with Aaron Leconte, son of the greedy town administrator Laszlo, Gus becomes enmeshed in Las Ráfagas’ precarious political situation at the powerful Leconte family’s behest. In her new role as deputy marshal, she uncovers snippets of shady dealings that suggest Laszlo is “snatching natives, trying to force down the price of…land and shares” and attempting to drive away the Vega family. In addition to these abuses of power, she learns that the native Deiopeans—“child-sized bipedal spiders”—are at risk of deadly exploitation. Gus must saddle up for a new mission: save Las Ráfagas before being killed by the Leconte family’s militia. In this inventive novel, Raye creates an instantly absorbing world, seamlessly marrying SF technology and Western tropes. The floating mining station has a complex history of colonialism with its subjugated robots, genies, and displaced Indigenous population. As readers gradually uncover the scope of the historical abuses of power alongside Gus—an indelible queer protagonist with her share of vices—her reluctant move from a focus on monetary gain to comradeship with the townsfolk is a deeply satisfying one. Gus and the community’s fight for justice is a reflective allegory for contemporary times.
An imaginative, genre-bending gunslinger tale with a compelling queer protagonist.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781963029109
Page Count: 411
Publisher: Alex Parker Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An ambitious but plodding space odyssey.
Having survived a disastrous deep space mission in 2038, three asteroid miners plan a return to their abandoned ship to save two colleagues who were left behind.
Though bankrolled through a crooked money laundering scheme, their original project promised to put in place a program to reduce the CO2 levels on Earth, ease global warming, and pave the way for the future. The rescue mission, itself unsanctioned, doesn't have a much better chance of succeeding. All manner of technical mishaps, unplanned-for dangers, and cutthroat competition for the precious resources from the asteroid await the three miners. One of them has cancer. The international community opposes the mission, with China, Russia, and the United States sending questionable "observers" to the new space station that gets built north of the moon for the expedition. And then there is Space Titan Jack Macy, a rogue billionaire threatening to grab the riches. (As one character says, "It's a free universe.") Suarez's basic story is a good one, with tense moments, cool robot surrogates, and virtual reality visions. But too much of the novel consists of long, sometimes bloated stretches of technical description, discussions of newfangled financing for "off-world" projects, and at least one unneeded backstory. So little actually happens that fixing the station's faulty plumbing becomes a significant plot point. For those who want to know everything about "silicon photovoltaics" and "orthostatic intolerance," Suarez's latest SF saga will be right up their alley. But for those itching for less talk and more action, the book's many pages of setup become wearing.
An ambitious but plodding space odyssey.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-593-18363-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
Elegiac and elliptical, this slim novel is a sobering read.
Six astronauts on a space station orbit the planet over the course of a single Earth day.
Two hundred and fifty miles above the Earth, a space station goes round and round. Over the course of 24 hours, the astronauts inside experience sunrise and sunset 16 times. Though they're supposed to keep their schedules in tune with a normal “daily” routine, they exist in a dream-like liminal space, weightless, out of time, captivated and astonished by the “ringing singing lightness” of the globe always in view. “What would it be to lose this?” is the question that spurs Harvey’s nimble swoops and dives into the minds of the six astronauts (as well as a few of the earthbound characters, past and present). There are gentle eddies of plot: The Japanese astronaut, Chie, has just received word that her elderly mother has died; six other astronauts are currently on their way to a moon landing; a “super-typhoon” barrels toward the Philippines; one of the two cosmonauts, Anton, has discovered a lump on his neck. But overall this book is a meditation, zealously lyrical, about the profundity and precarity of our imperiled planet. It’s surely difficult to write a book in which the main character is a giant rock in space—and the book can feel ponderous at times, especially in the middle—but Harvey’s deliberate slowed-down time and repetitions are entirely the point. Like the astronauts, we are forced to meditate on the notion that “not only are we on the sidelines of the universe but that it’s…a universe of sidelines, that there is no centre.” Is this a crisis or an opportunity? Harvey treats this question as both a narrative and an existential dilemma.
Elegiac and elliptical, this slim novel is a sobering read.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802161543
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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