Skip to main content

Blue Shift (SF) - Jane O'Reilly ****

Blue Shift, published by Piatkus, is the first novel in O’Reilly’s The Second Species Trilogy. It’s a fast paced, page-turning, planet-hopping space adventure set at the end of the Twenty-Second Century as the Earth is in the final stages of decline. It also blends erotic romance with science fiction, so may not be the first choice of some hard-core tech-geek science fiction fans. If, however, you’re not adverse to a bit of cross-genre writing and some intimately detailed sex scenes, then look no further.

Blue Shift introduces us to Jinnifer Blue, a poor little rich girl on the run and an expert pilot with some interesting and illegal genetic modifications. When a particularly dangerous job goes wrong she ends up stranded on an all-male prison ship with a notorious and dangerous space pirate, who turns out to have some modifications of his own. If that’s not bad enough, the pair of them discover an horrific secret on board the prison ship that is destined to have serious repercussions for them both and humankind as a whole.

There is lots of action, including seat of the pants flying, explosions, betrayals and blaster-fights, as well as the romantic and physical attraction you might expect from a more mainstream erotic romance. I’m not a science writer, so can’t really comment meaningfully on the science behind the story, but the future universe the book creates seemed credible and I wasn’t distracted by any gaping logic-holes in its structure. It is inhabited by an interesting mixture of stratified humans, droids and aliens and a senate full of politicians as trust-worthy as any in the Twenty-First Century. There are also some nice touches such as the terminal global-freezing of the Earth, caused by humankind’s botched attempt at dealing with global-warming.

The writing is smooth and polished and the story hurtles along at a pace that kept me both wanting more and delivering it. This is not cutting edge or profound and thought-provoking science fiction, but it is vastly entertaining. 

Jinnifer Blue is a strong and potentially complex female lead character and I hope those complexities will be played out and explored a little further over the trilogy.  Blue Shift is all about the ride, as it were, but there are enough high-charged dramatic storylines to keep the series evolving meaningfully over the following two books. It is worth repeating that this is the first book in a planned trilogy. Readers expecting a satisfying ending tied up neatly in a bow (or even leather bondage straps) are going to be disappointed. The story is set to continue into book two, Deep Blue, and, I suspect, won’t achieve a satisfying climax until the end of book three.

Paperback 

Kindle 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by J. S. Watts
J.S.Watts is a UK novelist and poet. Her poetry and short stories appear in a diversity of publications in Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the States. Her poetry collections, “Cats and Other Myths”, “Years Ago You Coloured Me” and a multi-award nominated SF poetry pamphlet, “Songs of Steelyard Sue”, are published by Lapwing Publications. Her latest poetry pamphlet, “The Submerged Sea”, is published by Dempsey and Windle.  Her novels, “A Darker Moon” and “Witchlight” are published in the UK and the US by Vagabondage Press. Her new paranormal novel, “Old Light” is due out in summer 2019. You can find her on Facebook at  or on her website  

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Philip Ball - How Life Works Interview

Philip Ball is one of the most versatile science writers operating today, covering topics from colour and music to modern myths and the new biology. He is also a broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, The Music Instinct, and Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also a presenter of Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He is also the author of The Modern Myths. He lives in London. His latest title is How Life Works . Your book is about the ’new biology’ - how new is ’new’? Great question – because there might be some dispute about that! Many

The Naked Sun (SF) - Isaac Asimov ****

In my read through of all six of Isaac Asimov's robot books, I'm on the fourth, from 1956 - the second novel featuring New York detective Elijah Baley. Again I'm struck by how much better his book writing is than that in the early robot stories. Here, Baley, who has spent his life in the confines of the walled-in city is sent to the Spacer planet of Solaria to deal with a murder, on a mission with political overtones. Asimov gives us a really interesting alternative future society where a whole planet is divided between just 20,000 people, living in vast palace-like structures, supported by hundreds of robots each.  The only in-person contact between them is with a spouse (and only to get the distasteful matter of children out of the way) or a doctor. Otherwise all contact is by remote viewing. This society is nicely thought through - while in practice it's hard to imagine humans getting to the stage of finding personal contact with others disgusting, it's an intere

The Blind Spot - Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson ****

This is a curate's egg - sections are gripping, others rather dull. Overall the writing could be better... but the central message is fascinating and the book gets four stars despite everything because of this. That central message is that, as the subtitle says, science can't ignore human experience. This is not a cry for 'my truth'. The concept comes from scientists and philosophers of science. Instead it refers to the way that it is very easy to make a handful of mistakes about what we are doing with science, as a result of which most people (including many scientists) totally misunderstand the process and the implications. At the heart of this is confusing mathematical models with reality. It's all too easy when a mathematical model matches observation well to think of that model and its related concepts as factual. What the authors describe as 'the blind spot' is a combination of a number of such errors. These include what the authors call 'the bifur