THE STARS NOW UNCLAIMED

There’s a moment of spaceship-piloting derring-do in The Stars Now Unclaimed where you can practically hear John Williams’s asteroid field chase music from The Empire Strikes Back ringing in your ears. This is a glorious romp of a space opera to quieten people who grumble, “They don’t write them like that anymore.” It’s Star Wars meets Firefly meets Lensman meets The Stainless Steel Rat, and it doesn’t care who rumbles the fact.

Set in a universe where an apparently freak radiation incident has robbed many – but not all – worlds of advanced technology, plunging them back into pre-industrial societies, it follows an unnamed agent scouring worlds for children with special abilities. But she keeps running foul of one particular warrior race that avoided the effects of the radiation, the Pax – and who seem to be amassing forces for an assault on… who?

There’s loads of action, and mythology-building, with vivid characters and snappy dialogue propelling a breathless plot full of near-misses, narrow escapes and revelations. Refreshingly, the main three characters (four if you count the ship’s AI) are female, with the men fulfilling the “quirky support” roles. It’s relentlessly episodic and linear, low on originality, and too fond of infodumping and f-bombs, but remains an immersive, rollicking yarn. Dave Golder