I became aware of Dotson’s writing on social media (twitter, specifically), mostly because Gareth Powell regularly lifts her up. I love space opera and so I decided to look into this author. In many ways, her life story sounds a lot like mine. We both created worlds as children and young adults, wrote stories and fleshed out our characters, but are not full time fiction writers. The difference, of course, is that she has followed through on her dream and has written now a quartet of books in this “Questrison Saga.”
The story centers of Forster, a mid-level scientist/technician whose job description is never made really clear, who lives on Heliopause station, at the edge of the solar system. The book starts with him seeing, sensing, or experiencing some anomalous readings, and the investigation into those readings leads him to bigger and bigger problems. There is a whole host of characters, but the story really only focuses on 3 main protagonists, and 2 main antagonists, but there is more to the story than just the humans interacting on the station.
I read this book over a few days this week. I found the writing style to be simplistic, with short sentences, a lot of dialog, and not a lot of depth. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this book /feels/ a lot like the way I wrote my story when I was in junior high and high school. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes books have such dense impenetrable text that you can’t read it. That was not the case here. The chapters are short, they are all told in close third person from the main character’s perspective.
In the end, I was not super thrilled with this book. the amount of unrealistic technology (gravity on the station, psychic abilities) that was essential for the plot makes this book feel more like space fantasy than SF to me. I also was quite confused by the ending, which I won’t give away, but I am not sure what happened, how much time passes, or where they end up. That being said, I am very curious to see how the next book goes before I decide whether or not to continue to books 3 and 4.