I’ve got another review for you over at the British Fantasy Society website, this time for the brand new sci-fi thriller Goldilocks by Laura Lam, so named for the ‘Goldilocks Zone’, the region of space around a star in which human-habitable worlds might exist. I do love a good space travel story, although considering it largely takes place on a spaceship on its way to another planet, this one turned out to be unexpectedly relevant to current events taking place right now! As usual, you’re very welcome to go straight over to the BFS website if you’d like to just read the review, but I thought I’d talk a little bit more about the book here.
Goldilocks isn’t an easy book to pin down, because it has a lot going on – honestly, writing the first paragraph of my review (i.e. the bit in which I try to give a concise overview of the story) took ages! Suffice to say it’s a near(ish)-future space thriller about a team of astronauts leaving a climate change-ravaged Earth with the aim of reaching a habitable exo-planet called Cavendish, having stolen themselves a spaceship, and dealing with all manner of expected and unexpected challenges along the way. It’s also about inequality, prejudice and a group of women driven to prove a broken system wrong, about the corrupting power (and possibly also the occasional virtue) of capitalism, and probably lots of other interesting ideas which I’ve missed here.
As if that wasn’t enough scope for drama, in amongst the tight-knit group of astronauts there’s a power struggle taking place, quietly at first before becoming more prominent. Initially it’s in terms of Naomi and Valerie’s relationship, as Naomi tries to prove herself and step out of Valerie’s shadow – she recognises the advantages she’s had as a result of their relationship, but wants to be able to demonstrate her achievements on her own terms. Over time it becomes a more tangible conflict, as Naomi starts to question Valerie’s decision-making and whether the mission they’re all on is exactly what she thought it was going to be. Considering that the five women of the crew are stuck in a spaceship a very long way from safety, the escalating conflict generates some considerable tension (I’ll say no more for fear of spoilers)!
There wasn’t room to mention it in my review, but one of the little touches that I liked in the book was the way each chapter had a sort of timestamp, referencing the number of days since launch and before reaching Cavendish. It’s a useful tool to help the reader maintain clarity of what’s happening when, especially as the main narrative – i.e. travelling through space – is interspersed with flashbacks to earlier points in Naomi’s life. Once or twice I felt like these flashbacks, interesting though they were, slowed the pace down a little bit, but the main narrative remained pacy all the way through the book, and those timestamps helped add a sense of urgency as the next stage of the mission crept closer. The flashbacks are also really valuable in terms of contextualising Naomi and Valerie’s relationship, so they’re very much worth having.
I can’t write about Goldilocks without talking about all of the cool science stuff (technical term) it includes, revolving around the mind-bogglingly complex requirements of sustaining life on a spaceship and on a new planet, and simply getting space travel to work. It hit just the right balance for me, of characters dealing with and talking about the science without me as a reader feeling like it’s being pushed upon me or covered in too much detail. In fact, with Naomi being a botanist I really enjoyed reading about her work cultivating food onboard the Atalanta and thinking less about warp travel and gravity, and more about the sort of science that isn’t often a factor in science fiction. Of course there’s still plenty to think about in terms of space itself, and I very much enjoyed Lam’s even-handed depiction of it as both deeply beautiful and utterly, uncaringly deadly.
So it’s very much a science fiction book, a tense thriller set to the backdrop of cold space and an increasingly distant Earth which doesn’t celebrate the Atalanta’s mission but rather decries it, and is actively working to stop Valerie, Naomi and co. For all the science and space, however, it’s worryingly relevant – a near-future depiction of a world where people wear masks any time they go outside (sound familiar?), where climate change and disease and political unrest are terrifyingly real. Topical is the word, and in the global climate in which it’s being released I’ve a feeling it’s going to hit pretty close to home for a lot of people. It’s not just about the big topics though, and there’s a real sense of powerful, personal drama running throughout as well. If you’re on the lookout for a sci-fi thriller, I’d definitely recommend this.
If you’d like to know a little bit more about Goldilocks, you can read my Rapid Fire interview with Laura Lam right here. If you haven’t already checked out my review, make sure you do click this link and visit the British Fantasy Society website to have a read of my more formalised, objective thoughts on Goldilocks. I’d love to hear what you think if you’ve read this article and/or my review and are tempted to pick it up. Drop me a line in the comments below, or find me on Twitter to let me know!