Book Impressions: Star Nomad by Lindsay Buroker

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 15, 2017

I’ve read a few books / stories lately that I figure I ought to actually devote a blog post to. My time for anything outside of work, sleep, and spending time with my family has been at a premium lately due to day job schedule fun. There’s only 168 hours in a week BTW… I’m coming to see that as a limitation lately.

Anyway – I’m still usually able to spend a few minutes reading and playing some kind of game each night. It makes it slow going for a novel, but I do what I can. One of my recent reads was Lindsay Buroker’s Star Nomad.

I liked it.

Lindsay Buroker is a fan of the TV series Firefly. Even if she hadn’t admitted it in her afterword (and her love of many other SF shows which also inspired the book), I figured this one out within the first three or four chapters of Star Nomad. The author has clearly put a lot of care into creating her own universe and characters, and setting up her own interesting spin on things, but the intended market is clearly readers who were fans of the TV series. Which really ought to be EVERYBODY, so that’s an easy market to hit.

It works. She mostly captures the style and feel of the show, while still keeping things mostly fresh. Granted, after only one quick-paced book, it’s hard to have nearly the handle on the characters when it’s sort of the “ensemble cast” kind of situation. Until I’ve read more of the series, I’m just going to say, “It’s got potential.”

It’s only a couple of years after a big interstellar war where the Rebellion managed to topple the tyrannical Empire. Yay! Only Alisa, a fighter pilot and pre-war freighter pilot who had been recovering from battle injuries for months after the war ended, finds herself stranded on a planet in the middle of nowhere, and discovers that in the wake of the Empires fall, there’s an awful lot of anarchy and other powers filling the vacuum. She works with an engineer to steal back her old freighter from the junkyard and get it flying again. But of course, nothing “goes smooth.” They have to deal with an imperial cyborg squatter on the ship, the powerful local mafia, space pirates, alien bears set loose on a station, and more.

It’s high-action, high-adventure space-opera type stuff that’s all about the story and the characters… not so much the science. Which suits me just fine. It’s a quick, fun read. Good ‘n pulpy.

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