THE SUPERSONIC PHALLUS, gay historical romantic story

THE SUPERSONIC PHALLUS
STEVEN KEY MEYERS
The Smash-And-Grab Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$2.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: When cub reporters Dean and Sam of the Sinai, Colorado Sentinel investigate UFOs seen over Two-Mile Mesa, they have no idea of what they’re about to face—or of what they’ll end up doing. The time is July 1947—the great flying-saucer scare, when thousands of Americans suddenly report seeing UFOs over every part of the country.

Dean is gay, but Sam (our narrator) is decidedly not! But as they interview witnesses and maintain high-altitude stakeouts, Sam begins to fall in love with Dean. Are the UFOs to blame? Is Dean merely the handsomest man Sam’s ever seen, or a space alien? And are the UFOs actually Russian aircraft out to steal U.S. atomic secrets?

The Air Force sends P-51 Mustang fighters to shoot down Sinai’s aerial invaders, even as the Government insists people are just seeing weather balloons. But one night, after a veritable supersonic phallus streaks overhead, Dean and Sam risk everything to let the world know the truth.

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My Review: Sam...married, kid, wife pregnant...wakes up to man sex when Dean enters his life. It's the Cold War, the Lavender Scare, and they're chasing the newly-named UFOs as sightings make the world news...are they Soviet spies, are they really aliens, is this some secret intelligence project we lifted from the recently-defeated Nazis? No one knows but Sam and Dean mean to find out.

It's all told from Sam's PoV and in his voice, which honestly feels light and humorous. I was surprised by that, as he is a man with some deeply unsettling issues to deal with. Not least really lusting after Dean; though that one's tough for anyone anytime. You want someone you're not married to, that's trouble; but they're same sex and the world, the Army, the government in general are all having fits because queers = bad, queers = spies...humor might not be everyone's first option of tone.

It's not comedy, it's not tragedy, it's a dramedy. I smiled more than I laughed, first when I found out out heroes are Sam and Dean and we're in a paranormal hunt for facts and truth. I wondered if it would be fanfic for Supernatural, but that was not my impression as I read along. I'd wondered also if we were to be treated to sex scene(s) but this too was not wher Author Meyers was headed. Sam's awakening was enough of a stretch, in that day and time. Plus when you live in a small town (Roswell is clearly the model) and are pursuing the armed forces to give you information they do not want you to have...well, first rule of surviving in the news biz is "never hand your enemy the gun."

It's a short read. I'm really glad I read it to keep my mind occupied with troubles not immediate to me or real but really grounded and relatable. What it did for me was make me aware that I live a deeply fortunate life as a gay man in the twenty-first century, and how very under threat that is.

Gratitude, meet vigilance, y'all're gonna be roommates in my skull.

Fun, light of tone and serious of purpose. Serves both masters very well indeed, and for three bucks as an ebook, you won't go wrong.

A RUIN, GREAT AND FREE concludes the Convergence Saga with book 3

A RUIN, GREAT AND FREE (Convergence Saga #3)
CADWELL TURNBULL
Blackstone Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$29.99 hardcover, available now

One of Ancillary Review of Books' 2025 Notable Books!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From bestselling and award-winning author Cadwell Turnbull comes A Ruin, Great and Free, the stunning conclusion to the popular Convergence Saga.

It has been nearly two years since the anti-monster riots. The inhabitants of Moon have been very fortunate in the intervening months. Inside their hidden monster settlement, they’ve found peace, even as the world outside slips into increasing unrest. Monsters are being hunted everywhere, forced back into the shadows they once tried to escape from. Other secret settlements have offered a place to hide, but how long can this half-measure against fear and hatred last?

Over the course of three days, the inhabitants of Moon are tested. The Black Hand continues to search for them and the Cult of the Zsouvox wants to make Moon the last stand in their war against the Order of Asha. This is more than enough to reckon with, but the gods have also placed their sights on Moon—and they bring with them a conflict that may either save or unravel the universe itself.

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My Review: Nothin' like uppin' the stakes in the last book in a series!

Not that anything was ever low-stakes here; but after becoming multiversal, adding heavy conflict among the gods afflicting the timelines, and starting from the baseline of shapeshifters being a real, oppressed minority, one can be forgiven for feeling...overwhelmed...in the toils of the complexification.

It's all big fun, though, if the previous volumes and their events are all on board one's mind. (My reviews might help you decide on whether this read will suit you.) As the storyverse has expanded, the stakes have multiplied and the worldbuilding has grown more ornamental than structural. It's to be expected; no one should start reading the series here because the world won't make enough sense to get the novice reader involved.

For the invested reader, Author Turnbull provides narrative guidance to put together the strands of this multiversal concluding chapter. It is complicated; it requires thought and rewards reflection; it does not hide its political stances. Since I am sympathetic to them I have no issue with that. This entire series needed to exist, to feed queer people the visibility of others without being Othered, to explore the world queerness as baseline identity, all are things that needed to be done. But the fight scene between the werebear and the dragon is the main reason Cadwell Turnbull *had* to start writing this series.

As much as I like Author Turnbull's politics, I read fantasy novels seldom...not the biggest fan of the genre, me...and when I do I want to have real fun, some thrills, and a background of worldbuilding that involves my brain in more than the ordinary tropey elves and suchlike. This series has delivered on each of those desires from giddy-up to whoa. The monsters are just plain folks, as is almost always the case when one gets to know the Othered; same desires, interests, needs, and the differences are vanishingly small when seen against the backdrop of greater familiarity. That makes their monsterness feel endearing to me. It becomes the urban-fantasy marker that does not turn off this less than eager fantasy reader.

I'm pretty sure anyone who reads my reviews can figure out why I approve of the queer representation herein.

A gory meditation on how much hatred costs, how misguided it is, and how gods, mages, multiversal Powers all have aims that barely touch our own so contact (let alone involvement) should be avoided. Grief and loss are the lot of all sentient beings; so spread kindness and acceptance, please.

It won't be in this series but I look forward to Cadwell Turnbull's next book.

THE PARADOX HOTEL, rollicking good time-travel story

THE PARADOX HOTEL
ROB HART
Ballantine Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$4.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An impossible crime. A detective on the edge of madness. The future of time travel at stake.

January Cole’s job just got a whole lot harder.

Not that running security at the Paradox was ever really easy. Nothing’s simple at a hotel where the ultra-wealthy tourists arrive costumed for a dozen different time periods, all eagerly waiting to catch their “flights” to the past.

Or where proximity to the timeport makes the clocks run backward on occasion—and, rumor has it, allows ghosts to stroll the halls.

None of that compares to the corpse in room 526. The one that seems to be both there and not there. The one that somehow only January can see.

On top of that, some very important new guests have just checked in. Because the U.S. government is about to privatize time-travel technology—and the world’s most powerful people are on hand to stake their claims.

January is sure the timing isn’t a coincidence. Neither are those “accidents” that start stalking their bidders.

There’s a reason January can glimpse what others can’t. A reason why she’s the only one who can catch a killer who’s operating invisibly and in plain sight, all at once.

But her ability is also destroying her grip on reality—and as her past, present, and future collide, she finds herself confronting not just the hotel’s dark secrets but her own.

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My Review: Witty, fun dialogue describing a very standard plot. I'm not complainig, I'm explaining. If you like our Unstuck heroine,January Cole, you'll like the whole effort. I liked her; I think most of y'all might as well. If you're not all lemon-puckered about SF, you might already know Author Rob's work from The Warehouse. (Plenty of subtext in that sentence if you know what you're looking for.)

"Unstuck"? Um, well, yeah...it's a time-travel book, featuring some yucky trillionaire types without morals or scruples, who can afford their very own access to time travel:

“There’s this saying, about people who are born on third base and think they hit a triple,” I tell him. “About the way people inherit wealth and power and think that not only did they earn it, but they deserve it. We deal with a different sort in this place. People who were born on third base and think they built the stadium.”

A consequence of developing time travel is that some people come "Unstuck" from their roots in...whatever Time is...hence are "Unstuck." Think The Time Traveler's Wife, or Everything Everywhere All at Once. Like all the best time-travel stories, those and this one are about bigger things, grief, the idea of inequality, the process of identity versus the certainties most of us crave for identity to provide...y'know, Life.

Author Rob digs in, plays it out, makes us care while taking our little teeny Stuck selves through a mad, whirling, loud maelstrom of voices and ideas. January lost Mena, grieves for her, but...what does loss really mean to someone Unstuck? Why is everything everywhere here and why is now all at once? With time crimes to solve, security professional January needs to track everyone and through the everywhere that is the Paradox Hotel...which is being sold in the process of the US Government privatizing the ability to time travel, just to add some more complexity.

And who's the dead guy in room 526 that no one else can see?

All of these are questions January needs to solve/resolve. It's the only focus she has that can override her desperate, raging grief for Mena. And it might keep her employed at the Paradox Hotel.

And alive. All because she's Unstuck, so the only one who *can* do it all.

I don't offer a fifth star because the humor is often bitter, sometimes forced, and always facetious. I resonate with most of it. I love Jodi Taylor's emotionally intense, very funny books; they're happy humor, laughing...sometimes mordantly...together with the story. In Author Rob's work, we stand outside and laugh at things with January. It can feel off-putting. So no fifth star for you.

It's still a really good time for the right mood, the right reader, the right moment. Look into it!

MARGARET KILLJOY'S PAGE: THE SAPLING CAGE, transfem MC wants to save the kingdom; & A COUNTRY OF GHOSTS, queer, anarchist SF

THE SAPLING CAGE (Daughters of the Empty Throne #1)
MARGARET KILLJOY
The Feminist Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 ebook, availablle now

Rating: 4.5* of five

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 URSULA K. LeGUIN PRIZE! Winner announced on 21 October 2025.

The Publisher Says: In the gripping first novel in the Daughters of the Empty Throne trilogy, author Margaret Killjoy spins a tale of earth magic, power struggle, and self-invention in an own-voices story of trans witchcraft.

Lorel has always dreamed of becoming a witch: learning magic, fighting monsters, and exploring the world beyond the small town where she and her mother run the stables. Even though a strange plague is killing the trees in the Kingdom of Cekon and witches are being blamed for it, Lorel wants nothing more than to join them. There’s only one problem: all witches are women, and she was born a boy.

When the coven comes to claim her best friend, Lorel disguises herself in a dress and joins in her friend’s place, leaving home and her old self behind. She soon discovers the dark powers threatening the kingdom: a magical blight scars the land, and the power-mad Duchess Helte is crushing everything between her and the crown. In spite of these dangers, Lorel makes friends and begins learning magic from the powerful witches in her coven. However, she fears that her new friends and mentors will find out her secret and kick her out of the coven, or worse.

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My Review: Transfem main character in a fantasy novel? Yes please. What else, one might reasonably ask, would Author Killjoy (transfem herself) write? Short answer: Any-damn-thing she likes. The fantasy universe here is beautifully evoked, the system of magic is well-thought-out, the costs the use of magic exacts on the user are all both disturbing and condign, this is in short the kind of secondary-world fantasy one always hopes to find.

Lorel herself, our PoV character, is carefully delineated to be consistent: born a boy in a world where magic is only wielded by females, transfem Lorel (believably bisexual in desire) is clearly female coded from the off. She does not like violence, but can definitely motivate her aggression in defense of loved ones or in the face of inflicted violence. She's somewhat spottily presented to our mind's eye, in that her deliberate changes of gender presentation aren't detailed. I wasn't sure why someone presented as wearing a dress the last time she was described putting her hair in a man's topknot and passing after that. What happened to the dress? Was a dress a unisex garment? If not why make a point of her wearing one?

These are minor things to me, though, in the face of Lorel's journey into her true nature. Being within her society and still Othered, Lorel's way of observing the anarchist functioning of the witches was far less didactic than A Country of Ghosts (q.v.) It came across as an apprentice learning the ropes, watching the experts for tips and tricks, which is exactly what one expects. A coming-of-age story that's also a very risky coming-out story is a great set-up for a series about a fantasy world. It is, though, a set-up, so this is not a full story. There are, thank goodness, details left to develop...but that isn't always totally satisfying. I've knocked off a half-star for those holes falling too deep at times.

I loved the experience of learning about the magic system. I'm not going to go into it here because the idea is best encountered without early access to the facts. Discover with Lorel what magic is, can do, and exacts from its practitioners...and why.

I'm glad to say that, as book one of a trilogy, this is not full of tension-killing explanations. It will be interesting to see how Lorel, learning to trust herself as a transfem person, reconciles that with her culture's restriction of magical practice to biofem people. What will this do among the witches? Will the immediate consequences turn dire in this supremely cozy world?

Future books will tell!

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

A COUNTRY OF GHOSTS
MARGARET KILLJOY
AK Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$16.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: An epic political fantasy in the tradition of Tepper and Le Guin that explores the question of what an anarchist community can do to resist the assaults that are sure to come if any such social formation were to exist.

Dimos Horacki is a Borolian journalist and a cynical patriot, his muckraking days behind him. But when his newspaper ships him to the front, he’s embedded in the Imperial Army and the reality of colonial expansion is laid bare before him. His adventures take him from villages and homesteads to the great refugee city of Hronople, built of glass, steel, and stone, all while a war rages around him. The empire fights for coal and iron, but the anarchists of Hron fight for their way of life.

A Country of Ghosts is a novel of utopia besieged and a tale that challenges every premise of contemporary society.

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My Review: Very much in the same vein as The Dispossesed, a philosophical exploration of anarchy as a means of social organization. The horrors of hypercapitalism bashing into the anarchic anti-hegemony are always fun and interesting to encounter.

Told as a story, these ideas and attitudes make a much more lasting mark on the psyche than do more explanatory ideological works. It's easy to invest in the people Author Killjoy creates, as one might expect from the author of the Danielle Cain novellas.

There's nothing false, or clangorous, in Author Killjoy's work. There is no dumbing-down or slighting of issues that arise from this world's way of functioning. It's true that our ignorant interloper from imperialism needs to be brought up to speed. I don't think this counts as the dreaded infodumping, because the explicit intent of the story is to contrast a high-control system based on coercion crashing into a non-system of personal responsibility and collective action. Armies are fighting, and that should be impossible in anarchy...yet here we are, and Dimos (our stand-in) needs to understand why. He's set up as a muckraking journalist by temperament. He's shown to be an ill-fitting bit of grit in the imperial army's system, someone who is a misfit and outsider.

The way he's educated in anarchist principles of respect, for self, for others, for the natural world as it is absent religious stuff, is inspiring. I enjoyed the way Dimos's struggle to wrap his head around this utterly alien way of thinking is portrayed. After witnessing the imperials committing war crimes, his mind was more flexible and receptive. It made the way the Hron (literally "ghosts") explain their lives to him hit harder:

We are anarchists, and we are immortal. We are the country of ghosts, and we are immortal. We will fight them until we are dead, and our bones will fight them after. The memory of our existence will fight them…in each of their hearts we will brand the memory that those who are free will never yield. Today, let us be ghosts!
–and–
Take care of yourself. No, to hell with that, take care of your friends and let them take care of you. Do stupid things for them.

It's so very much not the way the individualistic empire invading them thinks; Dimos is slowly taking on board this radical reorientation of his worldview. Dimos is a bit of a gender essentialist, though being gay himself he might not have been...that's an authorial lacuna, along with the absence of enby folk among the Hron. I'm not sure he would ever bother to learn not to be, but it did actually clang through my awareness that he was an outsider among the Hron as much as within the empire he was born into.

A book that is so ambitious in its asks of the reader that it startled me how smoothly it went down. Every last one of my four stars was coated in a thick frosting of readerly happiness.

But ostriches? Really?

TOWARD ETERNITY, meditative title for a contemplative debut novel

TOWARD ETERNITY
ANTON HUR
HarperVia (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$12.99 kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: What does it mean to be human in a world where technology is quickly catching up to biology?

In a near-future world, a new technological therapy is quickly eradicating cancer: The body’s cells are entirely replaced with nanites—robot or android cells that not only cure those afflicted but leave them virtually immortal. At the same time, literary researcher Yonghun teaches an AI how to understand poetry and creates a living, thinking machine he names Panit, meaning "Beloved," in honor of his husband. When Dr. Beeko, who holds the patent to the nano-therapy technology, learns of Panit, he transfers its consciousness into an android body, giving it freedom and life.

As Yonghun, Panit, and other nano humans thrive—and begin to replicate—their development will lead them to a crossroads and a choice with existential consequences.

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My Review: This book renewed my faith in my judgment of poetry as a stalking horse for the worst kind of exclusionary snobbery. It requires a linguistic adept, a genuinely intellectually superior mind, to fathom its Sacred Complexities well enough to use it to create AGI, which (of course) then becomes a worthy love-object.

"Whether a life ends happily or sadly, what does it matter but the weight of the emotions one felt, the weight of the clarity of all the meaningful moments one possessed while living on this Earth, whether they have been good or bad? Is it not the weight, in the end, that really makes us human after all?" muses Panit the AGI. This beautiful phrase does convince me to give the writing four stars. This is prose I wish to high heaven other SFF writers would at least aspire to. Author Hur has been to the linguistic wellspring and used a solid-silver vessel to drink from it.

The idea of sentience being the connecting thread as we travel through a deep future of change and revision, of editing and shaping the narrative of consciousness, is where the other half-star comes from. The narrative device of one notebook passing among many hands, taking on many meanings, offers the reader a handle to grapple with balancing the solid-silver vessel Hur used while not losing control of the easily-spilled contents.

It's not going to be easy for many to move past the genders of the consciousnesses that take this notebook through time. That's a shame. I'll say that poetry, in this case, can draw in those questing minds. I'm pretty sure that has a downside. If what you want is to "{feel} these words against my skin as if they were physical objects, or as if they were light passing through the prism of my body and shattering into the spectrum. Had I ever truly understood any word before, ever? How could I have claimed to have made a study of poetry or that this study had made me human when I had never understood what it meant to feel words?", then you're in the proper aisle. If those sentiments, expressed in same-sex contexts, are going to make you uneasy, you're late for the exit.

Asserting that poetry is the proper lens for emotional writing is, honestly, disproved by this novel. It is a story with a plot, with development of multiple characters, and has an ending that flows from the events described herein. That is a novel in my eyes, and it does something poetry does not: It connects the reader...me...to Author Hur's worldview as chosen and molded into this story.

Change. Time. Immaterial movement. All are central to making a work a novel, not a poem. But because (I'm confident in this assertion) Author Hur's pharmacopoeia is the shape and weight of words before the end that is the sentence, what occurs is a valorization of the idea of poetry, which functions on that small, precise unit for its impact.

I liken this to a poem being a mosaic, a story being a fresco, and a novel an oil painting. Mosaics fall apart easily, the pieces are still pretty but don't do much to make an impression unless painstakingly restored by experts; frescos, done in sharply defined spaces and usually quickly can last for centuries and, even if volcanoes engulf them are still recognizably art; oil paintings are gigantic efforts to use malleable medium to create a simulacrum of reality, whose materials are slippery and prone to blending as well as subject to vagaries of fashion for their perceived beauty. Makes sense, too, as these are roughly the same order of appearance (assuming one counts folktales and fables and myths as stories not novels or poems).

Author Hur's debut novel is a beautiful work. It's a deep questioning of Humanity, humaneness. It's a story that moves the reader through the ideas, we don't often take time to articulate, of love and connection. Poetry isn't my choice of a defining trait of being human.

Words are...beautiful, sharp, shiny, eternally morphic words. Take this as your encouragement to go get Author Hur's first novel.

WELCOME TO FOREVER, lovely meditation on what makes you, you

WELCOME TO FOREVER
NATHAN TAVARES
Titan Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$10.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A sweeping, psychedelic romance of two men caught in a looping world of artificial realities, edited memories, secretive cabals and conspiracies to push humanity to the next step in its evolution.

For fans of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Ubik, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Evangelion.

Fox is a memory editor—one of the best—gifted with the skill to create real life in the digital world. When he wakes up in Field of Reeds Center for Memory Reconstruction with no idea how he got there, the therapists tell him he was a victim in a terrorist bombing by Khadija Banks, the pioneer of memory editing technology turned revolutionary. A bombing which shredded the memory archives of all its victims, including his husband Gabe.

Thrust into reconstructions of his memories exploded from the fragments that survived the blast, Fox tries to rebuild his life, his marriage and himself. But he quickly realises his world is changing, unreliable, and echoing around itself over and over.

As he unearths endless cycles of meeting Gabe, falling in love and breaking up, Fox digs deep into his past, his time in the refugee nation of Aaru, and the exact nature of his relationship with Khadija. Because, in a world tearing itself apart to forget all its sadness, saving the man he loves might be the key to saving us all.

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My Review: The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind only gay it up. I loved that film, and this book, for the same reasons: They show us how extremely integral to our sense of self and buying in to the social construct of reality memory is. If someone doesn't share your memory of something, is your memory wrong? If you can't find a memory in your mind, is it gone? Where'd it go?

After the strokes I had in 2023, these questions are more important than ever to me. They were never unimportant to me but have gained urgency as a result of that crisis. Reading this book with its structural similarity to my own experience of needing others...the kindness of others is literally everything, y'all, practice giving it as well as receiving it....to help me find my sense of myself in the world was satisfyingly resonant.

Questioning one's identity is a thing we're told magically stops for queer people when we come out. (Spoiler alert: It does not.) All the jostles to one's sense of self that a long-term intimate relationship brings are wildly out-of-proportion shocks to many of us. Fox meeting Gabe, meeting him again and again, and still coming up against that shocking wall of The Other as a complete and entire being not knowable to yourself, makes this a wonderful piece of relationship fiction. It's very much also a SFF exploration of overweening tech hubris. It's also a sly jab at the savior complex of the people who look at humanity as a set of problems to be solved. All of these facets are inherent in the story's conflicts, in the quest that Fox sets out on to rediscover and reintegrate himself after trauma.

I'll say that, after the success that was my read of A Fractured Infinity, I went into this sophmore effort hoping for no slump and wishing for an out-of-the-park homer. I got neither. I got the top-quality expansion on the strengths of the first novel, its relationships, and that is way more than enough to get an extra half-star from my stingy self. A full star didn't happen because the first book's film-editing style didn't thrill me this time, either. I honestly expected scene numbers and location directions. I suspect Author Tavares uses shot lists to organize the stories he tells...hoping for his sake this makes the film industry take him up and film both his stories.

This story should be of extra deep interest to readers over 35 because that group has, as a rule, experiences like Fox's and Gabe's to bring to the table. It is straight-people safe, no NSFW smexytimes to shock and/or affront you. The love story, the trajectory of a man constructing and reconstructing his life after a horrible, external trauma, ought to draw in all identities...or so I hope in this polarized world.

Very much a recommended #PrideMonth read for us and for allies all.

LOKI'S RING, latest from the deep wells of Stina Leicht

LOKI'S RING
STINA LEICHT
Saga Press
$18.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Gita Chithra embarks on a mission through space to save the robot she loves as a daughter—or risk losing her in the depths of Loki’s Ring—in this intergalactic space adventure from beloved author Stina Leicht.
Gita Chithra, the captain of the intergalactic ship The Tempest , is used to leading her crew on simple retrieval and assistance missions. But when she receives a frantic distress call from Ri, the AI she trained from inception—making her like a daughter to Gita—she knows she’s in for something much more dangerous.
Ri is trapped in the depths of Loki’s Ring, an artificial alien-made solar system, and says everyone in the vicinity has been infected and killed by a mysterious contagion. Gita and her team investigate, only to discover horrors at every turn, and are soon stranded themselves, leaving them vulnerable to infection and attack.
Forced to call on an old friend to help them out of this mess, Gita must succeed or risk losing everyone she’s ever loved.
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My Review: This story, set in the same story-verse as PERSEPHONE STATION, is propulsive, exciting, and deeply cool.
What you need to know, going in, is that Author Stina is of the present moment. This means that there are female and non-binary leads, there are straight, gay, polyamorous relationship configurations, there are artificial people called AGIs and not one thing is ever made about any of it.

As it should be. Unless the relationship is the point of the plot, or subplot, these are the details that enrich the story. That's all. I'm delighted with this. I'm excited that Author Stina is telling an old fashioned adventure and chase story with some first-contact elements and a healthy side of anti-capitalist messaging with all these characters following their varying bliss paths... and it's published by a major house with a real marketing push behind it. The happy, it will not stop.
Except there's more: this story is set in the already rich and enticing story-verse that my doted-on PERSEPHONE STATION was set in! (Go read my almost-5* review of that one.)
I know a perfect rating is always the hope of every reader, but the multiple viewpoints used in the story kept me from feeling quite as connected to the characters as a perfect rating would require. This technique is totally demanded by this particular story, but the desire to get to know just that little bit more about the AGIs, for example, left the tiniest niggle of "more, please" in this reader.