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Void (SF) - Veronica Roth ****

This is a single longish short story in Amazon's Far Reaches collection - and proved pleasantly engaging. I hadn't come across Veronica Roth before (apparently she wrote the Divergent series) but she has a light, readable style in this rather classic setting of 'working class folk on the spaceship'.

This is the home of Elton John's Rocket Man, which was very common in 1950s SF films and lasted through to Star Trek, when the writers were still essentially modelling their crews on nautical vessels, with their inevitably working class characters to do the dirty jobs. In Void, we meet Ace, one of the team who does onboard maintenance on a craft that shuttles between Earth and Proxima Centauri. She and her colleagues deal with everyday problems like malfunctioning toilets. You would probably think that by the time we can build near-light speed ships, we could also make a robot that could mend a toilet - and real life experience of space travel so far is that there is no real role for these figures, but it's a fun return to a classic concept.

Central to the plot, which is a sort of murder mystery, is the reality that because it's a near-light speed ship, the crew are travelling into the future compared to Earth, thanks to time dilation. I think Roth gets the physics a bit wrong - we're told that someone moves ahead decades in a single return trip to Proxima (rather oddly, Roth uses the shortening Centauri, which could apply to all sorts of bodies) - given a round trip is 9 light years, I can't see how the dilation can be more than 9 years - but it's a picky detail.

Like most attempts to do a murder mystery in a short story, there's not enough room to give all the twists and red herrings that really make such a tale, but Roth does a good job of exploring the life of a worker on such a ship, and the way that time dilation can mess around with their worldview. Fun.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

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