Cascade Failure is just plain fun to read. It’s got that found-family-full-of-misfits feeling from Firefly mixed with a whole lot of adrenaline-spiked space adventure and a truly great sense of emotion and humor. It was science fiction sunshine in a book…except with way more dead bodies. So maybe a partly-cloudy day in science fiction land?

I’m an atheist, but there’s a saying that goes something along the lines of: You make plans and god laughs. Well, something like that is certainly what happened when a guy named Jal is wandering around the docks on a space station looking to board a ship for his own (very personal) reasons and accidentally lands himself exactly where he doesn’t think he wants to be but maybe exactly where he needs to be. The captain is an AI who is more human than most humans, the engineer is also the doctor and wouldn’t know tact if it smacked her in the face, and the XO and he have…issues. Let’s call them issues. It’s just easier that way. 

But then they intercept a distress signal from a planet where everyone’s died all at once from something horrible, and the lone survivor has a story to tell, a theory about it, and a possible solution. They’re all absolutely nuts, but if they survive they might have just saved the universe. 

I know Sagas is a debut author, but this really doesn’t feel like a debut effort; and when I say that, I mean that it feels almost effortless. I feel like the crew of The Ambit has been living in Sagas head for a long time, like they’re friends rather than characters. The world building in this book is amazing, like maybe Sagas has been writing backstories for these characters, these planets, these space stations, and everything involved for quite some time now–almost like simulations she would eventually use to finally build the language that would bring this book to life. It’s an amazing story that ends up being a compulsive, page-turning read. I’m dying for book two!

I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.