Fiction Reviews
The Stardust Trail
(2024) Yume Kitasei, Harper Voyager, £16.99, hrdbk, 312pp, 978-0-008-70882-5
This is space opera and quite a reasonable example of it, though in the end it did not grab me as much as I thought it might. The story is set sufficiently in the future that we have space travel and have discovered the Interstellar Web, a series of wormholes that connect many planets. Humans have come across five alien species: the Frenro (creators of the Interstellar Web), the Quietling, the Farstars, the Belzoar, and the Oorani. Each is very different to the others and all have different cultures. Some get along reasonably well, others decidedly less so.
When we meet Maya Hoshimoto she is studying for her PhD in comparative cultures at Princeton University; at thirty one years old, this is something she has returned to. For the previous ten years she had been working out in the field, locating alien artefacts and returning them to their civilisations; she was very good at it and some would have called her the best art thief in the galaxy. However, one job went very wrong and now she is ‘hiding out’ back at her studies but fortunately no-one there knows of her past exploits. Neither do they know that as a child she had contracted a Frenro virus and is one of the 'Infected', and this has left her subject to acute migraines but also with an ability to see slightly into both the past and the future. Sometimes these visions can be very useful, though they are often confusing, and until things come about she can find herself haunted by glimpses of a future that has yet to make sense.
When the Nkosi Foundation donates the extensive collection of explorer Dr. Nkosi to the university, Maya spots that it includes a long-lost notebook from fellow explorer Dr. Wei Huang, with details of their expedition together over a century earlier. It was rumoured that the expedition had found a ‘stardust machine’, known to others simply as a grail, but they had then hidden it. This is the Frenro device that created the nodes of the Interstellar Web but the Frenro, who have no written language and rely entirely on racial memory, have forgotten where the grails are and even how to build or use them. This makes finding a grail extremely important, perhaps the greatest archaeological find ever. Her last job, the one that had gone so wrong, had been a search for such a grail and it had been in the company of her old Frenro friend and co-explorer Auncle.
Even as she tries to get her hands on the notebook, she is surprised when she is approached by Dr. Daniel John Garcia, a consultant for the CNE (Coalition of the Nations of Earth), who explains that the network of nodes is collapsing and the CNE need to find a grail to rebuild the network (and, incidentally, find out who is destroying them). Knowing her past and her impressive skills, he offers her a job working with him.
However, Maya has just received a surprise call from Auncle, currently in Earth orbit, who wants to search again for a grail. She knows that the Frenro are desperate to locate a grail as, apart from creating nodes, the device is also essential for the race to reproduce; having forgotten where the grails are hidden, the Frenro are a dying race and there have been no new Frenro for many centuries. It takes her only moments to choose her friend and saving the Frenro race, rather than helping the CNE, and so she finds herself on The Wonder, along with a new crew which comprises Wil Jenkins (a heavily armed ex-CNE combat soldier in an impressively equipped exoskeleton combat suit) and Medix (a Med-IX medical robot with Class III sentience). They make for interesting, but not necessarily to be trusted, companions. To make things more complicated, the ship is in two sections: half is filled with air for the humans, the other half is filled with water as Frenro are completely aquatic. And add to that, Medix has grown beyond his normal restraints and is developing free thought, experimenting with illegal emotion chips and the like, and is thus prone to outbursts of unusual behaviour at critical moments.
As they charge off into space on the trail of rumours and legends, Maya discovers that Dr. Liam Waterson (once a fellow student but now her tutor at Princeton) has signed up with Dr. Garcia’s team from the CNE and they are also heading into space and hoping, if they can keep up with her, that she will lead them to a grail (and the restoration of the Interstellar Web).
Needless to say, all does not go well; they have adventures on space stations and desolate planets that prove far less safe than they thought, come across the deadly remnants of past alien civilisations, and ultimately discover much about the Frenro and the Interstellar Web…
The story had many good points; it was set in an fascinating world of alien races and their histories, a robot that was seeking to extend itself and become more human (not the first to do so!), and we learnt more that was surprising until the story came to an interesting end which I was not expecting.
As with any tale, the author has to set the scene and introduce the characters and this can take time. In the case of this book, I felt this narrative slowed the opening of the story and it could have been a little crisper; indeed, the pace often felt a bit slow to me. Yet, during the action parts of the story, I felt them a bit rushed and sometimes had difficulty seeing the scenes and action as I thought the author saw it. All told, I found myself feeling not quite satisfied with the way the story read. In her acknowledgements, the author says ‘This was my first book written under deadline’ and perhaps that has not helped; a little longer and it might have flowed more to my liking. To repeat, it had much that was good and interesting and the story came to a solid conclusion and is thus a good read in many ways but, as I said to start with, in the end I felt it could have grabbed me a little more.
Peter Tyers
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