Frontier

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Hodder & Stoughton has signed two books by games journalist Grace Curtis, including her début Frontier.

As she travels, she encounters a variety of people and situations. Each reacts to her differently, and thus The Stranger becomes The Courier, who temporarily teams up with… well, Garraty. I quite liked Garraty. That’s all you’ll get about him from me, so as not to sand away the shine of discovery for you.

What is it About? 

I know this seems like a broad category, but I simply wanted to give the book credit for being an approachable science fiction novel. I enjoy science fiction, but it’s certainly my most read genre. I found Floating Hotel to be approachable while still being firmly planted in space. All in all, I genuinely did like Floating Hotel and would recommend it to others despite the ending. It's a good study of how to write realistic characters that readers get invested in. If the ending bothers you, you can come up with endings for the characters that are missing yourself -- I know that I will be giving them a happy one. It's a fun story with a genuinely interesting mystery with plenty of hooks and surprises. If you like science fiction that focuses on characters and their personal stories and relationships as opposed to big action and tech-heavy novels, this book might be the one for you. You know those science fiction novels in which there are four point-of-view characters, and each character gets point of view for a chapter, then we move on to the next? (I think Gibson's Cyberspace trilogy was the first time I really noticed it.) You know how you never know quite what's going on, and it's all very confusing? Well, in Floating Hotel Grace Curtis takes it to the max, and SOMEHOW, she makes it work! The dystopian world is Earth, populated by the religious fanatics who decided to stay on the devastated near-dead planet when everyone else was evacuated. They wanted to remain close to the Earth God Gaia, and saw space flight as a sin.

There was a surprising amount of humour scattered throughout the book, and I personally was grateful for it, as it helped eliminate some of the heaviness that might have occurred otherwise. I read an eARC of this book so thank you to Net Galley, the publisher and the author for allowing this. Floating Hotel by Grace Kurtis follows the motley crew of the space hotel Abeona. From its friendly manager Carl to its grumpy accountant Kipple to the ever-eager Reggie, all the different staff members have their own stories to tell -- stories that weave together into a tale of rebellion against the system, an encrypted message from beyond the stars, and the mystery of who the Lamplighter is, and if they can be safely extracted before the Empire gets to them.

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Floating Hotel is a complex story with a lot of different characters, all with their own life and dark secrets. At first, I thought it would be hard to separate all the characters since there are a lot of different POVs and almost every chapter is told through a new set of eyes which is quite at odds with how most books are written, especially the ones I’ve been reading lately. Our narrator and all the other characters all felt very genuine and unique to me so this read so well. The setting was easy to picture and imagine, the atmosphere was just cloudy enough to make it easy to fill in the details. This was just overall a well structured and thought out story. The truly wonderful part for me was the hopeful feel of this. Around the 70% there is a shift in the story and by the end I genuinely felt a hope and happiness there. It’s still a desolate earth and there were still terrible people on it but there was also hope, and that’s something rare for me in SF these days. The atmosphere is nice, interesting, with a good mystery at the center of it all. We follow a lot of characters, more than I am used to, with whole passages about their past and how they ended up in this space hotel. I can't say I was really attached to any of them, but I can't say either that I didn't care about them. Carl was one of the character I felt the most about, with Rogan.