Sliding Void
Captain Lana Fiveworlds has a ship, a debt problem and a gift for turning bad luck into worse luck.
Good to know: a short opening novella. The first three Sliding Void novellas are also collected in the single-volume omnibus Void all the Way Down.
About this book
A free-trader captain. A starship overdue an overhaul. An old contact she shouldn't trust, and a destination that isn't on any sensible chart. Sliding Void opens the series with the voice already fully formed — wry, frontier-laconic, alert to absurdity — and a one-evening read that establishes everything that follows.
Captain Lana Fiveworlds owns the Gravity Rose, a four-thousand-foot freighter welded together out of mismatched shipyards and held together by cunning. Her crew is one-of-each: Skrat, a green-scaled “dragon” who used to be a corporate executive before the gladiator pit; Polter, a religious crab-shaped navigator who hears the will of the Lord in every cargo contract; Zeno, a deadpan android with golden skin and a quantum-substrate mind; and a chief engineer who refuses to leave the armoured drive unit.
When a kaggen courier intercepts the Gravity Rose in deep space, the message is a destination — Hesperus, a failed colony reverted to a medieval ice age, outside Protocol recognition. The contact who sent it is one Lana owes a favour she'd rather not pay. On the planet, Prince Calder Durk — last of his House — has been betrayed by his bannermen, hunted across the snow, and reduced to one dagger and a manservant. He has an amulet that summons help, though he doesn't yet know what kind of help it is.
The trip changes the Gravity Rose's crew for good.
Sliding Void sets the operational register of the entire series — the freighter as home and pressure-cooker, the alien encounter as comic-then-dread, the deep-time mystery sitting at the back of the universe. It is also the introduction of Calder, whose long arc runs through every book that follows.
- you like Brian Daley's Han Solo Adventures or the Firefly register;
- you want short, fast, fully-voiced space opera you can read in an evening;
- you're a precursor-tech enthusiast and want to be on the ground floor of a long mystery.