That said, I’m sure many readers will enjoy this and find the staccato style a huge plus. I even flipped forwards on occasion to keep with the storyline I had been following and then went back to read the other bit afterwards. I found it very difficult to keep in the flow of the story at times because of this. The repeated occurrence of incredibly short chapters finishing on a cliffhanger. I am not a regular fan of hard sci-fi so I did just occasionally get that ‘woosh!’ sensation as the techno-babble or descriptions of technology, especially of the crew of the Jakob Waltz (which was probably all good physics and not ‘babble’ at all), parted my hair on the way over. I could rave on about this for paragraphs of spoilers, so I won’t and I’ll just say that it is genuinely page turning. It is researched to a T and all completely believable. The technical detail is amazing, everything from the impact of living on planets with differing gravities to how life on board a spaceship might actually be. The idea of an all-action hard sci-fi is not a familiar one, but this book pulls that off incredibly well. Intrigue, infighting, cover-ups and betrayals litter the pages as much as techno-concepts and incredibly believable hard sci-fi developments. Katryna Roja is facing a political fight over nothing less than the future direction of humanity. Meanwhile, back ‘home’ things are not any less tense. The commander, Jephora Cochrane, faces some impossible decisions and makes an impossible discovery.

Their ship is nearly pulled apart, trapped in a gravity field unable to escape. The crew of the Jakob Waltz find themselves facing a sudden existential crisis in the middle of what should have been a leisurely and routine ice collecting mission. A stonking, action-packed, hard sci-fi, adventure and political thriller

Stormhaven Rising by Eric Michael Craig