Shooting the Rift
Alex Stewart
Baen Books
Trade Paper $16.00
Ebook $8.99
It’s spring, when a middle-aged man’s thoughts lightly turn to…space opera!
Alex Stewart has been writing the Caiphas Cain novels and stories under the name Sandy Mitchell for the Warhammer 40,000 franchise.
Now he’s branched out and writing another series. This is grand old space opera in the grand old tradition. Or to put it another way, it’s a heckuva lot of fun.
Simon Forrester is the only son of a Naval officer in the Rimward Commonwealth, a matriarchial society. Tensions between the Commonwealth and the League of Democracies are getting tenser. So Simon goes and disgraces himself and ends up apprenticed on a merchant freighter in the Commerce Guild. He’s also working as a spy for his aunt, who is a covert intelligence officer.
Stewart weaves a more intricate plot that first appears. Pay attention to details.
Simon is a delightfully flawed protagonist. In the Commonwealth, almost all citizens are neurally wired into the net (or rather the equivalent). Simon is the ultimate hacker. This is what gets him in trouble. More than once. Lots more than once, in fact. Simon can’t resist snooping (and tweaking) were he shouldn’t like a kleptomaniac can’t help having sticky fingers.
This isn’t a grim and dark space opera. Yes, it’s a serious book, not a light bit of fluff. But Stewart injects quite a bit of humor into his tale and peoples it with entertaining characters you can’t help but like.
He also shows us several different societies in his universe. It’s a big universe, and I’d like to see more of it. The ending had a couple of twists I should have seen coming, but it was clear when I closed the book that this was just the beginning of the story. Everything is now in place for things to really take off.
I’m looking forward to the next volume. The way traditional publishing works these days, that will be a while. I’ll just have to content myself with the Caiaphas Cain series. I’ve already bought the first omnibus. It’s sitting right over there.