When Special Agent Petrov and Dr. Lei Zhang are woken up from cryogenic sleep, dragged freezing and dripping wet out of their pods with the ship’s alarms blaring in the background, they know something is very wrong. Warned by the Captain that they’re under attack, they have no choice but to investigate.
It doesn’t take much time to learn that they’ve been met by another vessel—a vessel from Paradis-One, Earth’s first deep-space colony, and their final destination.
Worse still, the vessel is empty. And it carries with it the message that all communications from the 150,000 souls inhabiting the Paradis-One has completely ceased.
Petrov and Zhang must board the empty ship and delve further into deep space to discover the truth of the colony’s disappearance—but the further they go, the more dangers loom.
REVIEW
This book was frustrating and easy to read at the same time.
This book follows a ragtag crew of characters in a spaceship, as they are sent to Paradise-1, mankind’s first space colony planet, when it suddenly goes silent. The crew includes Agent Petrova, a pilot Sam Parker, and a doctor Zhang Lei, all put into cryogenic sleep when the ship takes off. They’re al regarded as screw-ups, so you could say they won’t be missed. When they awaken, their survival on the ship isn’t guaranteed, and there’s no sign of the ship’s AI. But there is a robot that the ship picked up along the way. Soon, they realise that this mission isn’t a routine check, and something more dangerous.
This novel is over 600 pages, but somewhere within them, there’s a good story. The chapters are short and easily digestible, and the author plays with some neat futuristic ideas with respect to the setting. There are some tense moments, many of chaos, and ones that did have me worried for the character’s survival. There’s also some really good body horror in the story, a lot of it unsaid.
However, I kept reading solely due to chapter length. The pacing of the book was incredibly tiring as I didn’t find any part of the book where it could remotely be called consistent. The individual chapters are fine, but put them together, and they did not become a cohesive whole. I did wish that some characters got more page length in places so that all perspectives could be fully fleshed out, but also that certain interactions and conversations were quite repetitive. The book promises delivers on a lot of elements it promises, but put them all together, and they did not work for me.
The acknowledgements alerted me to how this book was put together. It was a collaboration that was put together by the author credited on the cover, and in hindsight, that explains a lot of the problems I had with it. If you want to pick it up, it might help to keep this in mind, since the right expectation can go a long way in calibrating a reader’s mind to receive a book as positively as possible for their subjective taste.
To conclude, I did have issues with the book but wouldn’t go as far as to say that I regret the time I spent on it. I’m not sure if I’ll pick up the sequel when it’s out, but it definitely contains some neat ideas and an interesting story.
I received a review copy of this book from the author/publisher. Quotes, if any, are taken from the ARC and subject to change upon publication.
LINKS
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