Review: Kitra

Kitra by Gideon Marcus
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Initially, I couldn't help comparing this with my friend Lisa Cohen's Derelict . Youthful crew, led by a young woman, take off in an old military ship and find there's an issue with it that sends it off into space; they have to work together to get home.

It's not very similar to Derelict apart from that premise, though. The Derelict crew don't intend to be a crew, and have a lot more personal and interpersonal issues. Their biggest challenge in getting home is learning to work as a team, not just the bare fact of the situation itself. And the gender distribution of roles is different: in Derelict, the young woman who leads the crew is also an engineer, and the biologist is male, whereas here the technical work is done by the men and the biology (but also the captaining) is done by the women.

The other space opera that this reminds me of is The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet , because the crew is much more at that end of the at-each-other's-throats/working-together-as-a-team spectrum. It isn't as quirky, though, and there's a bit more of a plot.

Kitra gets big points from me for one thing in particular: fuel. In so many space operas, the issue of fuel is completely ignored. The rag-tag crew of outcasts in their battered old spacecraft fly hither and yon around solar systems in remarkably short amounts of time, repeatedly landing on planets and taking off again, and they never seem to need to refuel. That's not the case here; in fact, a shortage of fuel is a major plot driver. I did question whether the capacitors were realistic in terms of energy storage density, but I'm willing to give that a pass, given how well the rest of the story was written.

There are moments of triumph, moments of despair, interpersonal moments (though the flirting never comes to anything), moments of brilliant solutions to seemingly intractable problems, moments of courage in the face of the odds. It's emotionally satisfying without being (too) scientifically implausible. I found it well paced, too, with a good mixture of "everything is going great, we're going to achieve our dreams" and "oh, crap, we're all going to die".

Recommended, and I will be watching for more in the series.

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