Eight passengers – tourists vacationing at the luxurious Sigma Station deep space holiday resort and two crew – a boozy Russian pilot and a wet-behind-the-years new Tour Guide – set off aboard the Red Panda for a there-and-back trip to witness the celestial delights of the Horsehead Nebula. No sooner has their rickety, past-its-best little vessel left Sigma than the station is attacked by a mysterious hostile spaceship and blown to pieces. Tens of thousands of lives are lost in an instant. But what about the tourists and the crew aboard the Red Panda? It’s a short hop craft, dangerously ill-equipped for a long slog across space to the nearest ‘jump gate’ and severely lacking in supplies to keep passengers and crew alive in the vague hope of rescue.
Rob Boffard, the author of the well-received Outer Earth trilogy, has crafted a propulsive, page-turning thriller which is as much the stuff of the classic disaster movie as it’s the latest in a line of ‘space adventure’ stories in the style of Andy Weir’s The Martian. Where Weir’s Mark Watney found himself stranded on the lifeless surface of Mars, Boffard’s colourful cast are effectively lost in space, light years away from home with little hope of rescue and little more than their own wits and ingenuity to keep them alive. Adrift is classic survivalist fiction and Boffard piles on the agony as the group bounce from drama to crisis and back again. Not long after the destruction of Sigma (and having somehow avoided the spinning debris field), a fire breaks out in the ship’s hold, followed in short order by the freezing of the water supply. Then there’s the little matter of the strange enemy spaceship which is still in the vicinity and is moving curiously towards them…
In truth, much of the science-fiction content of Adrift is a little on the hokey side but the book works because Boffard deftly develops his characters, creates schisms between them, forces them to take sides and eventually – probably inevitably – pits them against one another physically as fear and tensions boil over. Naturally enough, not all the passengers are quite who they seem to be; there are hidden agenda and secret loyalties and eventually the only real voice of non-hysterical reason left aboard the ship is level-headed ten-year-old Corey Livingstone whose brother Malik spends his time buried in his holocamera device and whose parents are tottering on the brink of divorce. All human life, etc…
Occasionally a bit long-winded and sometimes given to veering off into backstory tangents when you’d really rather just be getting on with the story, Adrift is a clever, gripping, niftily-written read which will find favour with fans of rollicking, unpretentious space opera adventures (we kept thinking of Blake’s 7 for some reason). One to pack in the suitcase for that perfect summer beach reading session.
ADRIFT / PUBLISHER: ORBIT / AUTHOR: ROB BOFFARD / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
