Either the Corp isn't as badass as Aguirre wants us to believe, or it's a whopping case of author's convenience, but we're never satisfactorily told how March and his crew managed so easily to fly into the station where she's being held, bypass all the AI security, and get her out with only token resistance from the 'grey men,' the Corp's armed guards, whose function here isn't much different from the NPC's in first-person shooters who exist to be mown down. But she is sprung from her cell by March, who has been hired by interests on an outlying world intent on training up their own jumpers and cutting into the Corp's monopoly, and who want the secret of Sirantha's longevity.Īguirre makes all the expected newb mistakes in her early chapters. It's made clear that she's being set up and that the Corp is Up To Something, because evil faceless corporations always are. Sirantha has lasted longer than most.Īs the novel opens, Sirantha is jailed by the Corp, which has accused her of causing a crash that left her pilot/lover and dozens of VIP passengers dead. Coming down is hard, and jumpers tend to have brief careers before they burn out. The problem with being a jumper is that the experience of jumping has a narcotic effect quite like a heroin rush. Far different from Steven Gould's concept, Sirantha works in tandem with a starship pilot by virtue of a genetic mutation that helps her guide the vessel through 'grimspace,' which is Aguirre's variant on hyperspace, or whatever extra-universal reality SF writers like to imagine ships go to in order to cheat the speed of light. The Corp, one of those faceless monolithic entities that tend to serve as the all-purpose metavillain - here representing the evils of monopolistic governmental bureaucracies and unchecked capitalist greed - in stories like these.Īguirre's clever idea here is that of Sirantha's profession, a jumper.

Sirantha Jax is a navigator working for the Farwan Corporation, a.k.a.

Ann Aguirre's debut is another space opera-cum-romance, which means if you're a reader likely to squee over that kind of thing, notch the rating upward, while those of you who would rather have bamboo shoots under your toenails won't find a lot here to disabuse you of your distaste.

Grimspace