By Max Barry

Hodder, out now

The Earth is at war with a race dubbed the Salamanders – and the Providence ships are humanity’s greatest weapons. But what place do people have on board?

Many genre fans will be familiar with one of John Carpenter and Dan O’Bannon’s early works – the SF movie Dark Star, which featured a crew on board a spaceship who end up dealing with a bomb with a brain. (Yes, I’m aware that’s a huge generalisation but that’s its core.) Max Barry’s latest novel takes the ideas behind Dark Star and treats them seriously: how would four very disparate humans deal with being out in space for so long, realising that they actually are not essential to the running of the hugely powerful ship that they’re on?

Barry has carefully worked out the strengths and weaknesses of each character, and the chapters are told from a separate point of view, occasionally backtracking to provide a different perspective on events that we’ve already experienced. Some of them are more in the loop than others as to what’s going on aboard the Providence; others just think they are – and that’s before they start querying the actions of the ship’s AI. The first portion of the book allows us to get to know the humans so that when disaster inevitably strikes, we have an idea how they’re going to react – although some key bits of psychological evidence are withheld till later.

Those who enjoyed Barry’s earlier work, particularly Lexicon, will be pleased by a portion that goes into the structure and meaning of language, and there’s some suitably macho heroics at certain points, but both feel slightly out of place. The meat of this is in its human interactions.

Verdict: A different sort of space tale. 7/10

Paul Simpson

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