The Burning Dark

January 20, 2014
In a spacefaring future, Capt. Abraham Idaho “Ida” Cleveland’s cunning victory over the Spiders at Tau Retore is rewarded with a posting to a backwater naval demolition facility in the Shadow star system. He soon discovers that his victory has been erased from the official records and that he is a pariah. Isolated and bored, he turns to amateur subspace astronomy and hears a message from Earth’s long-forgotten past, a harbinger of grim events to come. After inadvertently opening the door to Hellspace, Ida winds up at the center of a carefully orchestrated storm of occult and alien forces. The novel is an awkward partnership between the implausibility of space opera and the lurid violence of horror; an idiosyncratic use of ship names borrowed from various 20th-century comics and several references to the phantom cosmonaut crackpot conspiracy theories fail to distract from the cardboard worldbuilding and weak, derivative plot. Agent: Stacia Decker, Donald Maass Literary Agency.

February 1, 2014
Space-horror yarn from Christopher (The Age Atomic, 2013, etc.). With Earth desperately trying to defend its colonies from attack by alien machines gigantic enough to chomp entire planets, Capt. Abraham Idaho "Ida" Cleveland scored a notable success by heroically destroying one of these "Spiders." As a result, he acquired a robotic knee and was pensioned off, his last assignment to oversee the decommissioning and deconstruction of a superannuated space station in orbit around a "toxic" purple star in the remote depths of space. But Ida finds strange occurrences plaguing the U-Star Coast City. The station's Commandant Elbridge has unaccountably vanished. Computer and communications problems are rife, thanks to interference from the nearby star. Worse, the station's complement of marines (but what are they doing there?) believes he's lying about his exploits--of which there seems to be no record in the official Fleet databases. And the empty corridors echo with odd noises and baffling shadows. Ida's only friend is Izanami, a mysterious blue-eyed Japanese woman who seems to be some sort of medic. So Ida builds himself a space radio and proceeds to probe the forbidden wavelengths of subspace--where he picks up a transmission seemingly from a female Russian cosmonaut who lived a thousand years ago. So far so...not good, but OK. But in a situation where either everybody is in denial or uninterested in asking pertinent questions, or even in pursuing a rational course of action, readers are entitled to a sense of frustration. And the anticipated flood of gory action fails to materialize. Instead, things drone on, becoming ever murkier and less absorbing. We are reminded of Doc Ostrow's dying gasp in the classic movie Forbidden Planet (1956): "Monsters, John. Monsters from the Id."

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Starred review from March 15, 2014

As his last assignment with the Fleet, Capt. Idaho Cleveland heads to the U-Star Coast City to assist with the space station's decommissioning. Put in place as a science station around an unusual star known as Shadow, the Coast City also served as a defensive outpost against an implacable and technologically superior enemy known as the Spiders. From Cleveland's arrival it's obvious that things are not quite right on the station and the strange purple light from Shadow seems to be making the skeleton crew aggressive and paranoid. Isolated, resented, and bored, Cleveland builds a radio that somehow picks up a signal from across time and space that might be a message--or a warning. VERDICT This dark and chilling novel from the versatile Christopher (Seven Wonders; Hang Wire) builds tension expertly. Claustrophobic in mood but with the scope of great space opera, this is sf you will want to read with the light on. Although the ending arrives quickly, this is apparently the first book in a new series exploring more of the world of the Fleet and the Spiders.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2014
About a thousand years from now, a heroic spaceship captain (he once saved an entire planet from destruction) is given a discouragingly less-than-spectacular assignment: he's in charge of the demolition of an old space station in a remote star system. Captain Abraham Idaho Clevelandhe goes by Idafinds himself ostracized by his fellow crew members, who frankly don't believe his stories of planet-saving heroism, which aren't supported by official Fleet records. When Ida builds a space radio, taps into the subspace frequency, makes contact with an astronaut who died a millennium ago, and discovers some seriously troubling goings-on aboard the mostly deserted space station, well, nobody believes him about any of that, either. Like water turning to ice and then to steam, this novel changes its properties several times. It begins as a fairly straightforward sf yarn, shifts gears and becomes the story of a persecuted (and possibly delusional) man alone among a shipful of unbelievers, and then plunges full-tilt deep into horror territory. An exciting new novel from an exciting new voice in sf.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)