Review: The Driftborn, by Simon Bullock

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/252725186-the-driftborn
Storygraph: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/ff1dc076-433f-409f-9cbb-b3857e9998c8
Amazon: https://a.co/d/0aZs34GH (Canada) https://a.co/d/0iyRG1df (USA) https://amzn.eu/d/04mwepeF (UK)

Blurb

A forgotten wreck. A forbidden map. A gate that should never have been opened. On the salvage moon of Veyra’s Fall, Kade Renn only wants one thing: a working air filter for his sick sister, Lira.

Instead, he finds a buried courier ship older than the official history books. Inside it is a dying Driftborn pilot, a forbidden star map, and a message from Kade’s mother, Elian, who supposedly died nine years ago.
The Directorate says the gates saved civilisation. It says the Driftborn are criminals, free-route smugglers and a threat to every recognised human world.

The Directorate is lying.

Forced to flee with Lira, their strange scrap-mech Nix, and a half-illegal ship called The Moth, Kade is pulled into a hidden war over the true origin of the gates. The deeper they travel beyond authorised space, the more dangerous the truth becomes.

The first crossing was not what humanity was taught.

The gates were not built by us.

And something has been waiting for us to understand what we woke.
For readers who enjoy grounded space opera, ancient alien mysteries, damaged ships, found family, dry humour and human stakes beneath the scale of the stars.

The Driftborn is a tense, character-driven science fiction novel about control, memory, survival and the danger of mistaking every door for an invitation.

My Review

Thanks to The Write Reads for organising this tour. I bought my own copy of this book, because it’s too long to read as an ebook. I didn’t take the author up on his offer of reimbursement, although it was kind of him to offer.

This was a fun read, especially the banter between Kade, Mara, Nix, and Lira, the four main characters. The relationships of these four hold the story together, it’s the main brace. Around them, in their little ship The Moth, the world is dangerous and frightening, and they have to do dangerous and frightening things, but this little family does it for each other. The siblings, Kade and Lira, need to find their mother, and that drives them. Mara needs to help her friends and fulfil an old lady’s request. Nix loves Lira with all his mechanical heart and just about tolerates Kade. For a cat-sized mech, he’s hilarious.

The group start their adventure by running from a Directorate agent, find hidden communities, also hiding from the Directorate, communicate with ancient devices, and end up in a new solar system. It’s a big adventure that starts with two orphan siblings trying to survive. The ‘big adventure’ part is important – they’re on a journey of discovery, they meet new friends, find allies, deal with adversity, and find answers to their questions. At the end they’re changed and looking forward to the future. Classic structure. They even have a couple of elder-mentors in Vessa and Senn.

The Directorate is a familiar feature, an all encompassing, all-pervasive government, controlling everyone’s lives ‘for their own good’. In this novel we see the effects not just on the community of Veyra’s Fall, but on the galaxy at large, as that control results in disaster when the ‘gates’ misunderstand the meaning of their actions. The control of the Directorate is personified by Sorr, an agent determined to ‘contain’ the first gate, even though her efforts caused major issues in the past and killed Kade and Lira’s mum. She is obsessed that her way is the only possible way and it almost kills her.

The Ashen Orchard is an interesting setting. The history as a hidden city massacred by the Directorate and still surviving by cutting itself smaller and running when necessary leads to an interesting society where ‘maybe’ and survival are the only words that count. The description of the Ashen Orchard and the living core is particularly affecting, mirroring Vayra’s Fall – dark, patched together, and precarious, but the people of the Ashen Orchard are nominally free. The Directorate is a far-off threat. On Veyra’s Fall they are not free, even as citizens, and the Directorate is a daily threat.

As fun as it was there were some minor issues. There were times when I thought a character was in one place and they turn up in another, which was confusing. It could have done with a bit of refining – the formatting felt off and the structure was a touch wobbly.

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About the Author

Simon Bullock is a British-born author living in the Netherlands. He writes psychological thrillers, historical fiction and speculative novels with a focus on believable characters, emotional tension and dark, understated humour. His work often explores ordinary people under pressure, hidden truths, and the consequences of systems that fail the people inside them. He also writes selected speculative fiction under the pen name Richard Randon.