The Last Gifts of the Universe

August debuts with a thought-provoking postapocalyptic space opera about being alone in the universe. By the time humans developed the tech for space exploration, every planet they discovered was eerily deserted, but without evidence of violence or catastrophe. Now archivist Scout travels the desolate universe with their brother, Kieran, and their cat, Pumpkin, looking for data caches left behind by lost civilizations and hoping for clues as to what happened. On one such mission, Scout and crew discover a message that gives a name to the world-ending entity: Endri. It’s the best intel they’ve found and the closest they’ve come to being able to save their own people from meeting a similar fate, but a greedy, for-profit corporation eager to steal the information before they can get it in the right hands. The stakes should feel high as they race from one destination to the next, but August keeps things fairly mellow with a tight focus on the characters’ internal lives, frequent flashbacks, and excerpts from a data cache about the dead civilizations. Readers who like their space operas on the cozy side will find this hits the spot. (Oct.)

Correction: A previous version of this review used the wrong pronoun to refer to Scout and misidentified the source of the excerpts about the dead civilizations.