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Scourge Between Stars

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Otto’s lips pursed at the interruption. “Watson is the most advanced post-zettascale system ever constructed.” He didn’t have the decency, as its creator, to blush as he said so. “It’s about as difficult for her to ingest the data as it is for you and me to take a biscuit with our coffee.” It could take weeks—months— years to translate this data.” Otto hummed. “Perhaps longer to figure out how to use it to map a safe route.”

The Scourge Between Stars starts off feeling a bit like a haunted house story - there's inexplicable noises coming from within the walls, things malfunction seemingly without cause, panels explode, etc. It's an effective opening that primes us for Brown's ultimate reveal, even if that reveal isn't particularly surprising, shifting gears from haunted house to violent creature feature. It's very much an Alien clone (in fact, Jonathan Barkan opines that Alien is the perfect haunted house movie in his piece for Bloody Disgusting. If you're going to copy somebody's template, you may as well copy from the best, right?), but Brown puts in just enough of their own touches to make the story feel more like pastiche than pure derivative. Sadly, Brown's few attempts to make the story their own aren't quite enough to salvage the whole enterprise.She didn’t laugh. “What’s so secretive that you couldn’t tell everyone earlier?” They could have used some good news at the briefing, which was otherwise spent discussing how close the Calypso was to collapse. hrpanjwani on Reading The Wheel of Time: Taim Tells Lies and Rand Shares His Plan in Winter’s Heart (Part 3) 5 seconds ago I’m doing much more than that,” he insisted. “I’ve developed and imported into Watson a processing library more sophisticated than anything Data has ever run before. This morning I put the finishing touches on a new series of tasks that should be able to find what we’ve been missing.”

There's some word choices that feel a little off, one of those first-book, pre-hard-editing kinds of things (' stared at a horrible noise,' and my personal peeve, an inappropriate 'smirked'). Hopefully, that will improve in the final edition, but I'll note that it seemed better than the average first-book. Each of the ships in the fleet is named after goddesses and I liked the references. The characters also had distinct personalities and were fleshed out nicely, even for ones with limited appearances. The real spotlight however is in the story and intense atmosphere throughout the book. It perfectly captured the claustrophobia of being trapped in a hostile environment with nowhere to go. Speaking as someone who is already deep in Alien/Salvation Day territory, this book was everything I hoped it would be. I appreciated the no-nonsense pacing that didn't drag out for no reason what would be an immediate, crisis situation. The writing style was mostly matter-of-fact, but not without lyrical shine at times. It managed to be gritty and dark without crossing the line into exploiting the grief and depression felt by its characters.Trust me, if you think you know where this story is going, you're wrong. Combines the sudden, heart-rending fear of immediate danger with the freezing spun-out dread of being lost in infinite space. Just wonderful.” — David Wellington, author of The Last Astronaut The doctor asked for you.” The android stood up in a well-oiled stretch of repurposed metal. “He’s made progress.”

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