Saturday, August 22, 2020

Scott's Take: The Stars Now Unclaimed (The Universe After Book 1) by Drew Williams


The Stars Now Unclaimed by Drew Williams is a science fiction novel that reads like a tv show or a movie. This is not a bad thing as the debut novel is full of action, mystery, and where the world building features a massive number of very different characters that are fully formed beings with their own personalities. The alien species are incredibly diverse and so too is the lore of the series.


Jane Kamali has one job. She is an agent for “Justified” and her mission is to recover gifted children from different worlds and bring them to safety. The gifted kids are the key to saving countless worlds and lives from the return of the pulse. The pulse was a giant wave of energy that affected various worlds differently by destroying the technology of each world. Some of the worlds were massively impacted while others were not as much. Each world suffered to a different degree and that wave of destruction often changed the societies on a given world.  


The Pax and other groups like it want the gifted children to turn them into super soldier killers to help conqueror the galaxy. The Pax are a group of fascist zealots who believe they are the ones that are the rightful rulers of the galaxy and have yet to have any of their technology or abilities affected by the pulse. The latest target of The Pax is a telekinetic girl named Esa.  It is up to Jane and her group to save Elsa as the fate of everything hinges on her.


I know the premise sounds cliched, but that is just the beginning of the book. There is way more depth then one can go into here without spoiling large chunks of the novel.  It is clear that the author put tremendous thought into this novel as everyone has considerable depth of character internally as well as externally via relationships. This is a complex tale of good and evil at work in The Stars Now Unclaimed that is not remotely hinted at in the jacket copy or premise of the book.  This is book one of the series titled, The Universe After, and the moniker truly fits as, once the pulse hit, everything changed everywhere.


The book is full of moral depth with lots of philosophical debates and characters behaving realistically. It is a very complicated read that has plenty of jokes and great action sequences. Relationships and characters grow and evolve over time. I highly recommend The Stars Now Unclaimed by Drew Williams.


My hardcover reading copy came from the Downtown Branch of the Dallas Public Library System. I have a library hold in place for the sequel, A Chain Across the Dawn, and have requested them to buy the third in the series, The Firmament of Flame. Whether that purchase will happen with the budgetary cutbacks caused by the pandemic, I do not know. 




The Stars Now Unclaimed (The Universe After Book 1)
Drew Williams
Tom Doherty Associates    Tor
August 2018
ISBN# 978-1-250-18611-9
Hardback (also available in audio, eBook, and paperback formats)
448 Pages


Scott Tipple ©2020

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