Mar 122014
 

The Burning Dark by Adam ChristopherBooklist: An exciting new novel from an exciting new voice in sf. About a thousand years from now, a heroic spaceship captain (he once saved an entire planet from destruction) is given a discouragingly less-than-spectacular assignment: he’s in charge of the demolition of an old space station in a remote star system. Captain Abraham Idaho Cleveland—he goes by Ida—finds himself ostracized by his fellow crew members, who frankly don’t believe his stories of planet-saving heroism, which aren’t supported by official Fleet records. When Ida builds a space radio, taps into the subspace frequency, makes contact with an astronaut who died a millennium ago, and discovers some seriously troubling goings-on aboard the mostly deserted space station, well, nobody believes him about any of that, either. Like water turning to ice and then to steam, this novel changes its properties several times. It begins as a fairly straightforward sf yarn, shifts gears and becomes the story of a persecuted (and possibly delusional) man alone among a shipful of unbelievers, and then plunges full-tilt deep into horror territory.