Review: Fearless, by Allen Stroud

AD 2118. Humanity has colonised the Moon, Mars, Ceres and Europa.
Captain Ellisa Shann commands Khidr, a search and rescue ship with a crew of twenty-five, tasked to assist the vast commercial freighters that supply the different solar system colonies.
Shann has no legs and has taken to life in zero-g partly as a result. She is a
talented tactician who has a tendency to take too much on her own shoulders. Now, while on a regular six-month patrol through the solar
system, Khidr picks up a distress call from the freighter Hercules…

Review

Thanks to Anne for organising this blog tour and to the publisher for sending me a copy of this book.

The Rosie Synopsis

The Khidr crew are on a standard patrol when a freighter sends a distress signal. Captain Ellisa Shann to the rescue! Except things aren’t as simple as she or her crew think. There’s a traitor aboard and enemies await. Who can Shann trust when they have to escape the superior firepower of an enemy they didn’t know existed in a war no one admits is being fought in the outer edges of human space?

The Good

The use of a shifting first person narrative gives the reader a sense of action from different perspectives and depth to the narrative. Each character is going through a personal journey as well as a physical journey, in their perspectives and beliefs. The shifting alliances and relationships between the crew members as they are put through hell are graphically played out in each of the chapters relating to individual characters.

Only three characters, Captain Shann, Ensign Johansson and Specialist Sellis get POV chapters, but each adds to the story. Shann and Johansson are disabled but use their environment and technology to their advantage, especially Shann, who as an advantage in zero gravity with no legs. Shann places her worth and identity in being captain and in her ship, until she is forced into a place where neither of those matters. Johansson is super focused on her job in communications and desperate for Shann’s approval until she learns to validate herself. Sellis is a drunk, a gambler and a very selfish man who finds his purpose saving his crew. These individual journeys of self discovery happen against the backdrop of violence and confusion, and bring a poignancy to the narrative that a ‘great man’ (or in this case a ‘great woman’) type story wouldn’t have.

The technology of space travel in a couple of hundred years is realistic, a logical advance from current technology with little to no ‘handwavium’. It is all stuff that could happen given the trajectory of current technology.

The mystery of the ship that attacked the Khidr and the freighter, the reason for the attack and the strange black eggs, as well as weird clones, keep the story moving, along with gripping action and daring escapes. The inventiveness of the crew is a match with the personal journeys in terms of keeping interest in the story and the fight to survive kept me turning the pages.

The Not-So-Good

There was something slightly unsatisfying about the ending – I didn’t really get an answer to the mystery of why they were attacked in the first place. Is this a ploy for another volume?

The Verdict

Excellent adventure, gripping action and narrative with characters that develop and evolve with events.

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Allen Stroud is a lecturer at Coventry University, where he teaches BA (Hons) Media and Communications. Stroud completed a Ph. D. at the University of Winchester entitled An Investigation and Application of Writing Structures and World Development Techniques in Science Fiction and Fantasy. This thesis covered his work on the computer games, Elite Dangerous (2014) and Chaos Reborn (2016).

For Elite: Dangerous, Stroud wrote six guidebooks that inform the game’s
fictional narrative and also served to help other writers with their novelisations set in the game world. He was a founding host of Lave Radio, an Elite: Dangerous fan podcast that started in February 2013 and runs the annual convention Lavecon. His novel set in the Elite: Dangerous game world, called Elite: Lave Revolution was successfully funded on Kickstarter and published in late 2014, with a second edition published in 2015. Stroud then supported Spidermind Games in developing the Elite Dangerous Roleplaying Game. Stroud worked on Chaos Reborn with Snapshot Games and is working on Phoenix Point, due for release in 2019.

Stroud was the 2017 and 2018 chair of Fantasycon, the annual convention of the British Fantasy Society, which hosts the British Fantasy Awards. In June 2019, he became Chair of the British Science Fiction Association, taking over from Donna Bond. Stroud continues to write academic papers, reviews, articles and fiction in science fiction, fantasy and horror. He lives in a messy house with two cats and his partner, Karen.