Stars and Bones by Gareth L. Powell
(Titan Books, 2022)
Reviewed by Stuart Carter
Gareth L. Powell has, it seems, spent his pandemic rewatching some classic science fiction cinema, in particular Alien, Aliens, Battlestar Galactica, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, to come up with his own unique remix. Beginning with a classic horror opener (but it is only an opener!) when a spaceship detects a strange signal and impetuous humans land to investigate, only to wake something not only unpleasant but eager to spread, using the vector of those impetuous humans.
However, Stars and Bones does a lot of heavy world-building before the unpleasantness properly kicks off. For instance, 200 years before the events of Stars and Bones, on late 21st century Earth, World War 3 had broken out. We were only rescued by the intervention of omniscient aliens, who stopped the rain of deadly nuclear missiles when, literally at the very last moment, they detected a Zefram Cochrane-style invention of warp drive. Impressed by our human smarts, they saved the planet. Despite our impressive brains (or, rather, one brain), they were deeply unhappy with the attempted global suicide, and so humanity, although saved, was banished from Earth. The entire population (along with some domestic pets) was moved into hundreds of gigantic space arks and set to travel the cosmos until such time as we might again be trusted to take proper care of a proper planet.
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Review from BSFA Review 17 - Download your copy here.
