#BookReview: In Our Stars by Jack Campbell

In Our Stars (The Doomed Earth, #1) by Jack Campbell
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: science fiction, space opera
Series: Doomed Earth #1
Pages: 400
Published by Ace on May 7, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Lieutenant Selene Genji has one last chance to save the Earth from destruction in this pulse-pounding science fiction adventure, from the author of the New York Times bestselling Lost Fleet series.
Earth, 2180
Genetically engineered with partly alien DNA, Lieutenant Selene Genji is different from ordinary humans. And they hate her for it. Still, she’s spent her life trying to overcome society’s prejudice by serving in the Unified Fleet while Earth’s international order collapses into war.
Genji is stationed on a ship in orbit when humanity’s factional extremism on the planet reaches a boiling point, and she witnesses the utter annihilation of Earth. When the massive forces unleashed by Earth’s death warp space and time to hurl her forty years into the past, Genji is given a chance to try to change the future and save Earth—starting with the alien first contact only she knows will soon occur.
Earth, 2140
Lieutenant Kayl Owen’s ship is on a routine patrol when a piece of spacecraft wreckage appears out of nowhere. To his shock, there is a survivor on Selene Genji. Once her strange heritage is discovered, though, it becomes clear that Genji is a problem Earth Guard command wants to dispose of—quietly. After learning the horrifying truth, Owen helps her escape and joins her mission.
Together, they have a chance to change the fate of an Earth doomed to die in 2180. But altering history could put Genji’s very existence in danger, and Owen wonders if a world without her is one worth saving. . . .

My Review:

From the opening pages, In Our Stars read an awful damn lot like a Star Trek episode. Actually, several of them. Because this is a time travel story, of just the kind that Star Trek in ALL of its various iterations, has played with – A LOT.

It’s the year 2180, and Lieutenant Selene Genji of Earth’s United Fleet is just close enough to the event horizon to watch in horror as Earth is destroyed. Not by aliens, not by the Borg, not by accident.

But deliberately, by its own people. Not even in an attempt to throw off an alien invasion as in the first Avengers movie. In Lieutenant Genji’s 2180, Earth bombs itself out of existence in a fit of xenophobia directed at people just like her.

People who are ‘alloys’, who have a portion of alien DNA. Because after ‘First Contact’ with the Tramontine in 2140, genetic manipulation made that possible – and briefly – desirable.

But humans are gonna human, and some humans are just looking for an excuse to declare that other people aren’t people, and charismatic tyrants and despots are always available and all-too-willing to latch onto any stupid excuse to grab power.

To make a long story short, there was a large, influential group of people who believed that destroying Earth to purge it of alien influences would cause a new, pure Earth to emerge from the inevitable dust cloud.

The wrongness of that belief and her wish to change history to make sure this doesn’t happen again are Selene Genji’s last conscious thoughts before she’s rescued by Lieutenant Kayl Owen of Earth Guard, the only survivor aboard her derelict ship, in 2140, just months before First Contact.

Selene Genji has that barely conscious wish within her sights. She is in the right place – or at least at the right time – to prevent the destruction of Earth she witnessed 40 years in the future.

Whether she’s in the right place is an entirely different question, as Kayl Owen inherited his father’s disgrace to his service, and no one has any compunctions about making them both disappear in order to keep the secret of her existence from everyone who might care.

Which is way more people and forces than she expected, as the mysterious powers that took over Earth so quickly in her own time are considerably more active in her new here and now than Selene – or history – told her to expect.

It’s going to be an even longer road, NOT getting from there to here, than even a woman from the future could possibly have imagined.

Escape Rating B: I couldn’t get the resemblance to Trek out of my head, and that affected my reading of this book a lot because it felt just a bit too familiar. To the point where even though I didn’t know what was coming, I sorta/kinda knew what was coming. Also, to the point where I couldn’t resist falling down a Trek time travel rabbit hole. Or should I say, a time travel black hole, because that device was used frequently and often, even if that’s not quite what happened here.

The thing is, Star Trek played with time travel frequently and often. There’s at least one time travel episode in every Trek series to date, taking them in Trek’s chronological order, from the entire first season of Enterprise with its Temporal Cold War arc, through “What is Past is Prologue” (Discovery), “A Quality of Mercy” (Strange New Worlds), “Tomorrow is Yesterday” (The Original Series), “Yesteryear” (The Animated Series), “Yesterday’s Enterprise” (Next Gen), “Past Tense” (DS9), “Future’s End” (Voyager) and last but certainly not least, “The Star Gazer” from Star Trek: Picard’s second season. As well as one of Trek’s most famous and storied episodes, “The City on the Edge of Forever” from TOS, and two of its best and most popular movies, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, otherwise known as ‘the one with the whales’ and Star Trek: First Contact – the one with Steppenwolf’s marvelously apropos “Magic Carpet Ride”.

(The above list is ONLY a sampling. There are multiple time travel episodes and/or arcs in every Trek series. If you’re really curious check out the Memory Alpha wiki.)

The difference between most but not all of the Trek examples and In Our Stars is that in Trek it’s usually someone else who has mucked with the time stream and it’s the job of whatever series is running at the time to make things right. Although there have been exceptions.

The plot in In Our Stars is to prevent the worst from happening by mucking with the 2140 time stream as soon and as much as possible. The story is that neither of those things, fast or soon, are going to be as easy as Selene – and her soon-to-be life-partner Kayl Owen – either expect or even hope.

Which is clearly what is going to push the plot of The Doomed Earth series, of which In Our Stars is the first book, through the years from 2140 to 2180 and hopefully past that original disastrous day. Something that we’ll get to see in the months and years ahead, both theirs and ours.

I picked this up because Jack Campbell is an author who has been recommended to me multiple times, but by the time that happened his best known series, now called The Lost Fleet, with its follow up Lost Fleet Universe series, was already well past a dozen books in. I wasn’t in the mood to start from the beginning and don’t like picking things up in the middle if at all possible.

In Our Stars solved that problem, as it’s the opening book in a new series, so no catch up and no need to jump in the middle with both feet and hope for an informative landing. One of these days the ‘round tuit’ for reading Lost Fleet will emerge, as they do. But today is not that day.

In the meantime In Our Stars turned out to be a great place to get into a new-to-me author. The familiarity of the setup was a comfort that also made the plotting of the political craziness – because that’s definitely a feature – the touch of romance and the constant drive of our heroes on the run while building support – just that much easier to get into.

So if you’re looking for a new space opera type adventure with more than a hint of the familiar in all the best places, take a ride to 2180, or 2140, or both, In Our Stars.

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