This was one of those books I picked up from the library after reading just the blurb and looking at the front cover. Sometimes I enjoy the surprise of not researching a book at all. Since finishing it, I read that Corlett started writing again in 2011 while organising a move to the South West of England. She then started a freelance writing career around her day job as a solicitor and had short stories published in magazines and anthologies. The idea for this novel came about after a trip back to Northumberland and replaced a previous idea as her debut novel.
The Space Between The Stars is a science fiction story about a virus killing 99.9999% of the galactic human population and following a survivor seeking to reunite with her estranged husband back home on Earth. She remembered that the two of them had talked about a rendezvous in Northumbria in the UK if the end of the world ever happened and they had become separated, so that is where she seeks to go. Except when we meet her, she is stuck on a faraway planet without any way to get there.
We'll meet here, he'd said. If the world ever ends. How had something so throwaway become the thing they returned to when everything else was breaking and falling apart?
The story soon gets going and our protagonist Jamie meets other survivors - an ex-priest Lowry, an ex-scientist Rena and, perhaps most importantly for her intended journey, the captain and first mate of a star ship, Callen and Gracie respectively. Each of these different people have their own ideas for what to do with so much of humanity dead and gone and thoughts for survival in this new world.
There were some brilliant questions that the author poses that I really enjoyed watching the characters wrestle with, like what would you do if you woke up all alone with the rest of the population dead? If survivors managed to band together, what sort of society would you seek to build? Do the ends justify the means when it comes to humanity’s survival? Can you celebrate living when you have so much survivor’s guilt? Was this galactic pandemic the will of God? Coming up with my own answers for these types of questions is one of my favourite parts of science fiction and this book really sought to place the characters in those kinds of quandaries, and I enjoyed some theistic arguments between the different characters.
It's not that I don't like people. It's just that I like them better when they're a long way away, and I can switch them off if I need to.
Another challenge the author threw at the characters, and by extension the reader, was different types of people living in ways the others did not initially understand. Our protagonist has suffered multiple loses during her life and one before she was even born. One of our other characters lived and worked as a prostitute, another appeared to be a minimally verbal autistic, another was quite happy being physically alone as long as she could communicate over the internet, others were living in a historical re-enactment of an older society to avoid thinking about the current situation. All of these people are different and the way in which the author presents them as people getting by in a horrible time to the best of their abilities was excellent, and the other characters are able to react to them, creating worthy scenes that I enjoyed.
That’s not to say there weren’t some problems with the story. The first was that our protagonist Jamie was grumpy, sarcastic, angry and lashed out at other characters around her seemingly at random. I get that the entire human race has crashed down around her, but she could certainly be a little more polite to the others. She’d flip and flop back and forth. That’s not to say she didn’t have her positive moments too, or moments where that anger might have been deserved, but I still found it quite tiring by the end.
The next thing that irked me was the world-building. I love a good science-fiction future universe where humanity has colonised the stars, and while I saw one review that criticised a lack of aliens as if that’s a requirement when you get out past Pluto, I’m more concerned about how empty and yet so close together the disparate planets felt. It felt easy to travel between the different worlds and each world felt empty, even Earth. The only thing our ship captain really seemed concerned about was being able to obtain enough fuel to make the next leg of the journey. Yet one thing we were told was that overpopulation was rife on Earth prior to this pandemic. There seemed to be little evidence of humanity forced to live close together. When our characters were near the end of their journey, it felt like a nice holiday destination, rather than a world recently in the grip of unsustainable population growth. Where were the shanties, the huge piles of rubbish, the thousands of ghost ships in orbit or flying along the busy space lanes since their crews had died during the journeys?
Finally, speaking of planets feeling like they were close together, there was little discussion about the type of space travel that was taking place. Wormholes, warp drive, hyperspace, slipstream, who knows? It isn’t important. But what is important is I have no idea how any character could suggest jettisoning heavy cargo so that they could continue to fly through space. It’s not like they’d just run out of fuel and stop. I’m sure I saw that happen in The Last Jedi, but that was an awful space chase scene, so using similar space physics probably wasn’t a good idea here either. A quick edit to say that landing with that kind of weight onboard could require too much fuel so they need to dump the cargo or something like that would have been fine, but instead I found it incredibly jarring against science fact and most science fiction.
Overall I felt like this book was a few edits short of a good story, especially as a debut novel. The structure is there, the characters are there, but perhaps it should have been set in modern-day post-apocalyptic Europe or USA. I feel like the space opera parts could have been entirely replaced and it wouldn’t have affected anything other than the scale of the story, but then the story would have made a little more sense! Not great, but still had good bits here and there.
⭐️⭐️⭐️★★
