PG's Books

Alex J. Cavanugh’s science fiction books have always been a bit “different” than the standard science fiction fare in that he tends to mix biology and technology rather liberally. In his Cassastar series for instance the pilots are people with a skill that enabled them to teleport their ship through space. In this book animals are providing energy and powering starship in symbiosis with the Hyraths.

As you might suspect this is not a book for the die hard science lovers. The concepts are fairly wild and an animal providing powers to propel a starship between the stars, not to mention powering the weapons etc, is rather far out I would say.

I did feel that the reader was thrown somewhat into the deep end at the start though. The book takes off pretty much at once and there is not much explanation or world building done. A lot of concepts, like power generating animals, are talked about between the characters as if the reader would already be familiar with them. The same can be said for the social and political structures.

Nevertheless this is a fairly entertaining book. It is not very big, or at least it did not feel like a very big book. I read it rather quickly. It is a nice adventure story though. We get to follow the main characters through a number of adventurous episodes in his search for the famed ship. A little bit of romance is thrown in as well. The book is well written with characters that you enjoy following.