Barbary Station

Stearns’s competent but uninspired debut, set in the near future of our solar system, follows Adda and Iridian, lovers just out of college who hijack a spaceship in order to deliver it to a pirate captain and, hopefully, win a place on the crew, which is more appealing to them than corporate drudgery. Unusually, Stearns has managed to produce a setting in which space piracy makes both reasonable economic and logistical sense; however, the focus of the novel is more on the artificial intelligence that has trapped the pirates on the space station they intended to take over as a base. The AI shoots down most traffic, both incoming and outgoing, but Adda is a software engineer, and her skills are the key to the group’s escape attempts. The novel’s prose is clunky, but the relationship between Adda and Iridian is believable and sweet, and well-worn tropes such as the rogue AI and a future controlled by evil corporations are deployed with some originality. [em](Nov.) [/em]