The Burning Dark
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3.5 • 11 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Adam Christopher's dazzling first novel, Empire State, was named the Best Book of 2012 by SciFi Now magazine. Here he explores new dimensions of time and space in The Burning Dark.
Back in the day, Captain Abraham Idaho Cleveland had led the Fleet into battle against an implacable machine intelligence capable of devouring entire worlds. After saving a planet, and getting a bum robot knee in the process, he finds himself relegated to one of the most remote backwaters in Fleetspace, overseeing the decommissioning of a semi-deserted space station.
The station's reclusive commandant is nowhere to be seen. Persistent malfunctions plague the station's systems while interference from a toxic purple star makes even ordinary communications problematic. Alien shadows and whispers seem to haunt the lonely corridors and airlocks, fraying the nerves of everyone aboard.
Isolated and friendless, Cleveland reaches out to the universe via an old-fashioned space radio, only to tune in to a strange, enigmatic signal: a woman's voice that echoes across a thousand light-years of space. But is the transmission just a random bit of static from the past—or a warning of an undying menace beyond mortal comprehension?
"Builds tension expertly. Claustrophobic in mood but with the scope of great space opera, this is SF you will want to read with the light on."—Library Journal, starred review, on The Burning Dark
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a spacefaring future, Capt. Abraham Idaho "Ida" Cleveland's cunning victory over the Spiders at Tau Retore is rewarded with a posting to a backwater naval demolition facility in the Shadow star system. He soon discovers that his victory has been erased from the official records and that he is a pariah. Isolated and bored, he turns to amateur subspace astronomy and hears a message from Earth's long-forgotten past, a harbinger of grim events to come. After inadvertently opening the door to Hellspace, Ida winds up at the center of a carefully orchestrated storm of occult and alien forces. The novel is an awkward partnership between the implausibility of space opera and the lurid violence of horror; an idiosyncratic use of ship names borrowed from various 20th-century comics and several references to the phantom cosmonaut crackpot conspiracy theories fail to distract from the cardboard worldbuilding and weak, derivative plot.
Customer Reviews
Kind of feels like a good episode of Doctor Who
When reading this I thought on a few occasions it sort of felt like one of the better episodes of Doctor Who and then I saw in the notes about the author in the end that he was a fan, so no great surprise there.
I found it to be an engaging story and I really enjoyed it. I especially liked that it seems amateur radio is still a hobby, only it now reaches an interstellar level and finding one of the lost cosmonauts was a pretty cool touch too.