Six Against the Stars
The galaxy's greatest coward and five wildly unqualified companions attempt to save the universe.
About this book
One reluctant hero. Five lethal misfits. A galaxy on the brink of a digital apocalypse. Epic comic space opera from Stephen Hunt.
Horatio Bard is Earth's greatest musician, a celebrated dandy and — by his own frequent admission — a total coward. He'd rather sip green whiskey and romance noblemen's wives than save the universe. Then, on his birthday, the ghost of a dead scientist is hacked into his brain, and Horatio becomes the most wanted man in the galaxy.
The Human Trading Alliance is governed by the Wisdom — a moon-sized super-intelligence of a trillion digitised souls — and the Wisdom is dying, infected by the Sliders, a race of sentient nano-machines that turn whole planets to mud. The ancient House Volpone wants the secret in Horatio's head badly enough to burn Earth for it. To save the Alliance, Horatio must lead a crew of the galaxy's most dangerous and untrustworthy specialists into the Ebb, where the laws of physics are merely suggestions.
His team: a vat-born assassin, a cynical reincarnated revenue agent, a seven-foot Martian monk who treats murder as salvation, an antique detective robot with a Scotsman's temper, and a scientist rewired for pure reason. There's a traitor among them — and the deeper they go into the ruins of a lost civilisation, the more Horatio suspects his own “genius” might be the thing that destroys them all.
Hunt's ragtag-crew space opera at full throttle — a self-contained adventure with the chemistry of Guardians of the Galaxy or Firefly and a satirical edge aimed at a galaxy run by senile machines and pork-barrel aristocrats.
- you love the ragtag chemistry of Guardians of the Galaxy or Firefly;
- you want mind-blowing world-building with a satirical bite;
- you like high-stakes action carried by dark wit.