One and a half stars rounding up to two. This is a zippy little action sci-fi book for kids, with a nice sense of humour in parts (there's a disclaimer on the packet of freeze-dried broccoli, for instance, warning consumers that it won't taste any better than the real thing. I like broccoli myself, but still: ha!). It's total wish fulfilment for kids - the 12 year old hero Kip, is employed as the youngest ever space scout, sent out to find inhabitable planets to colonise, accompanied by a fluffy, friendly wolf-human hybrid and a spaceship that's bossily intelligent in the way of older siblings everywhere.

I can see why kids might like it, but the science makes me cringe. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff in a lot of scifi that you can just handwave away as being necessary for the plot, but you should at least attempt to get the rest somewhere in the ballpark of right. This is a high tech world where families go to Venus for the holidays, but Earth has one trillion residents and so that's why Kip and the rest of the scouts are off scouring the galaxy. Apparently colonising Mars won't do, as it's not enough like Earth, though one would think that with travel between the stars as easy as it is, terraforming would be a thing... not to mention birth control. Let's not even get into the fact that his ship goes at ten times light speed until it gets to a wormhole (WHY?! Just use the wormhole, don't decimate the laws of physics alongside population biology and resource management) and that he ends up running around a planet that's -210 degrees Celsius (I converted from the Fahrenheit, because apparently the future goes back to the system most working scientists don't use today) and he saves the intelligent inhabitants of that planet from dying by teaching them fire, because burning a few weeds is enough to counteract -210 degrees and reptilian biology. God.

It's irritating because, in this otherwise fun little story these problems are so easy to fix. Get rid of the ten-times-light speed, sort the temperature, lower the population and have terraforming adapt non-optimal planets and so on (there's other stuff I haven't mentioned). You can still have exploration after that, you can still search for other colony planets. Just don't teach kids crappy science while you do it!