Pretty much every book featuring a spaceship with a small crew is marketed as “perfect for fans of Firefly.” Counting this one, and counting the Final Architecture trilogy as one, I’ve read 9 books fitting the “spaceship with a small crew” description going back to 2020 when I stopped counting, and literally all of them get the Firefly comparison. Yet this book is the only one out of all of them that I really think deserves it.
In the world of Ambit’s Run, there are three powers to speak of in the galaxy. There is the Trust, a corporate consortium that basically runs humanity’s expansion through the galaxy as a capitalist enterprise. The one resource they don’t control is the people doing the colonizing; they’ve got the Union speaking for them, balancing (to some degree) the power of the Trust. And then there’s the Guild, an organization of white-hat do-gooders that keeps the little guy from being ground between the two titans as best they can. The Ambit is a Guild ship with a crew of three: AI captain Eoan, ex-soldier Saint, and engineer/medic Nash. The story begins when they stumble upon Jal, a wanted Guild deserter and ex-comrace of Saint’s. And then goes to hell when they respond to a distress call, finding a dead world, a crashed ship, and a lone survivor - a Guild programmer telling them about a secret computer virus the Trust has that can wreck terraforming systems and cause entire planetary atmospheres to collapse.
This is a good ol’ fashioned space adventure with shootouts, exciting chase scenes through exotic alien worlds, mega corporations ruining everything, unexpected twists and turns, and a snarky AI with a fascination for humanity. It’s the first in a series, but works perfectly well as a standalone - I generally get the feel that this series will be episodic, with each book being a new, more-or-less independent adventure for the crew of the Ambit. That’s just a guess, though this book works perfectly well as a standalone if you don’t mind a few dangly bits.
Why the Firefly comparison? Like most Millennial fans of genre fiction, I take is as axiomatic that Firefly is peak television and if it hadn’t been unfairly canceled we would have had a dozen seasons of perfection (please leave me in my illusions, thanks). It’s a comparison that, as I said, is often made, probably most frequently with The Expanse and Wayfarers. But the crew of the Roci got way too close to the centers of power to really hit the Firefly sweet spot, and the crew of the Wayfarer were in far too cozy & kind a universe for the Firefly sweet spot. This one nailed it.
Comes out on March 19.
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