Vestige - Chris Roper

RATING: THREE STARS

After banking to avoid a giant asteroid on their return journey to Earth, a small crew of astronauts is lost, drifting further and further away from their home as their fuel and supplies dwindle. NASA decided years ago that a rescue mission was too expensive and would pose to great a risk to the lives of the rescue party and the crew knows that no-one is coming for them.

Yet they do not give and are determined to survive for as long as possible and find a way back home. Their mission is bleak, but the arrive of a strange, alien cube proves to change all that. The cube is europhic and strange, changing their ship as much as it alters their perceptions and minds. Is the cube their salvation? Can it provide a way home? Or it something else, something darker, more sinister and dangerous?

The Good
Vestige is a nice book that makes for light reading. It's not too long and has a nice pace to the story, which builds up the characters before beginning to deal with the major plot events so I could really feel for the characters as the book unfolds.

It's also quite imaginative and Chris Roper and has based the story around the problems with an ever expanding universe - an issue that not many science fiction authors have considered before! Roper really goes into the bleakness that the future will eventually hold for our universe and how this will effect sentient life.

The Bad
There isn't really much description in the book and Roper never actually establishes the appearances of his characters or their surroundings. This is a shame because it left a major facet of his story bare and wouldn't have been too difficult for him to do. Novellas generally contain less description than full novels (due to their shorter length), but that doesn't mean it had to be stripped out altogether.

My Thoughts
Vestige was quite an enjoyable read and was the perfect length for a bit of light reading. It was not dragged out (so the story never became stale) and was fun to read, especially because it was a bit different to most science fictions novels published. Saying that, the book isn't as 'padded out' as it could have been and the lack of description did ruin it a bit for me.