Review of Across Our Stars: Victor, by A. Payne & N.D. Taylor

I enjoyed this story. It took a while to determine where things were going, but the setup/world building is important to the series I'm sure. There is mystery at first in what is happening, and then in who is perpetrating the crimes against whole colonies. To me, it is very realistic, as in life we don't always get all the facts at once, so we don't always know that there is danger, much less that it is headed our way. Because the POV is mostly with our heroes, we learn as they do that all is not well Across Our Stars.

I like Victor and especially Zoe. They are definitely heroes, and they do seem to belong together. Their romance is sweet and gets a bit steamy, but it is not the primary focus of this story. When the action really picks up after the halfway mark, be prepared to hold onto your seat!

The ancillary characters are well developed, too. I felt like I really got to know the crew, and that they weren't all simply cardboard cutouts just there for window dressing. I felt like the Jemison could be a proper starship, run by capable and quirky crew.

Best of all, for me anyway, is that I didn't feel like I needed to be a rocket scientist just to read this. Frankly, I started drifting away from Sci-Fi when it became so technical that I had to skip whole paragraphs and sometimes scenes because I don't CARE about the Kelvins produced in a dwarf star, or whatever. If a reader likes that much detail, they might consider Across Our Stars a bit fluffy, but this hearkens back to my favorite character driven Sci-Fi novels, like John Varley's Steel Beach.

I am definitely interested in reading the next story, as Hamish will have quite a story to tell after all he's been through.