One thousand years in the future, war hero Captain Abraham Idaho Cleveland is sent to oversee the decommissioning of an outdated space station. But what was supposed to be a routine job turns out to be nothing like he imagined. The station’s Commandant is nowhere to be seen, other space station crew keep disappearing, and the interference of a purple star causes the station’s systems to constantly malfunction. To pass the time, Ida builds an old-fashioned space radio only to hear a woman’s voice from the other side of the universe when he tunes in.
This book was an interesting science fiction novel with a little bit of horror thrown in. I started reading this book at night and I found it to be really creepy. Specifically, scenes where Ida sees someone in the reflection of his computer screen and then turns around and no one is there. Of course, I read that right before I had to wash my face and all I could think about was what if I look in the mirror and there is someone behind me? What it is about reading in the dark that makes everything so much scarier? Needless to say, I read the rest of the book during the daylight hours and, reading during the day in the bright light, I didn’t think this book was scary at all. There are parts that were suspenseful and creepy, but nothing that scared me.
The main protagonist Ida is an engaging character. He knows something is off the second he sets foot on the space station. It did take him a while to figure some things out, things that as a reader I had sussed out 100 pages earlier, but that’s okay. I kind of wanted to know more about the other characters. We get a few chapters from other points of view that go a bit into the backstory of some of the marines on the station, but they felt like they were lacking depth.
There were a couple of things I wished the author had explained more. First, there is a subplot that involves the conspiracy theory about the Lost Cosmonauts, and if I had not just listened to a podcast on that topic and then gone down a Wikipedia rabbit hole, I would have had no clue what the author was talking about. It’s never explained throughout the novel. Another thing that isn’t explained is that we are told throughout the novel that one of the characters is a psi-marine but it’s never clarified what exactly that is. We don’t learn until practically end the of the book that psi-marines have psychic powers (maybe??). Maybe I should have known based on the name, but there are no clues in the book that this character has any mental abilities.
Other than that I thought this was a pretty solid book. I also really enjoyed the world building and I was fascinated by the aliens that they are at war with – giant sentient machines called Spiders who can blast through and eat the core of a planet. I wanted to know more about them.
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