Not bad, fairly snappily-written character-driven sci-fi piece about being trapped in space. A lot of said characters follow tired archetypes a bit too much, but that's OK really.

This book was the first time I was introduced to the phrase "A thick English accent", and I can't work out what it's supposed to mean. (Thick accent should mean it's difficult to understand AND "Foreign"/non-native) I've seen this once or twice elsewhere since by American authors, so perhaps it's not Boffard's fault for using awkward phrasing. ( )

Adrift by Rob Boffard is an edge-of-your-seat sci-fi thriller about a small group of people on a tourist shuttle becoming stranded in deep space with very few options. Sigma Station is a tourist centre situated on the edge of the Horsehead Nebula. When the station is suddenly attacked and destroyed, thousands of people are killed but one small group in a tourist shuttle is overlooked. They have no weapons, very little food or drink and no idea of what to do next. The pilot manages to get them to the gate that allows the spaceships to jump through the wormholes to come to Sigma, but it has been destroyed as well. Not only that, but the attack ship is also there and this time it doesn’t appear to overlook them.

There was a lot going on in this book. Both passengers and crew had interesting backstories. Some of the passengers had ulterior motives for being there while others had secrets they were unwilling to share. The narrative jumps among the characters but the main focus is on Hannah, the tour guide who was on her first day at work, Corey a ten year old passenger who is obsessed with spaceships, and Jack an angry, estranged alcoholic. The story isn’t as much about the science of space as it is about the interaction among the characters, how they react to danger and who is reliable under stress and can come up with ideas for their survival.

I enjoyed this sci-fi survival story both for the exciting adventure and also for the development of the characters. As most of the story was set in the small tourist shuttle, it was quite claustrophobic but the author nailed the tension that developed both from the close confines that these people were in as well as the dire situation that they were thrust into. Adrift is a clever, thrilling, and well written book. ( )

Boffard, Bob. Adrift. Orbit, 2018.
Bob Boffard, whose Outer Earth series was set on a space station after a population collapse on Earth, has the knack of writing fast-paced science fiction thrillers with characters whose fates engage us. Adrift is also such a book, with the added virtue that its plot is tighter and more controlled than the earlier series. A large space station at the end of a wormhole is a tourist destination. A young woman is working her first day as a guide on a shuttle that gives passengers a good view of the Crab Nebula. Their pilot is a chain-smoking Russian with post-traumatic stress. But she has the skills to pilot the shuttle out of danger when the station is blown up by an unknown spaceship. The characters are a mixed bag, and we get to know them all. My favorite is Corey, a kid whose name I bet is an homage to Cory Doctorow in that he resembles so many of Doctorow’s clever juvenile protagonists. The story’s ancient ancestors include Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat and a host of films about airliners with baddies onboard. Is it mind candy? Sure. But that did not keep me from staying up late to finish it. ( )

Title: Adrift

Author: Rob Boffard

Publication Date: June 2018

Genre: Sci-Fi

Score: 3/5

Adrift is a bit of an odd duck. It starts out seemingly as a YA novel, but goes surprisingly dark. A group of tourists to the wormhole Sigma become victims of a war long thought over. Characterization is decent, but the story founders as it goes on.


( )

I enjoyed Adrift. It was a good vacation read, with lots of action and a decent pace. The concept was well thought-out and original. The writing could use a little polish, as there were some disconcerting passages where the point-of-view wavered between characters, but otherwise the prose was clean. ( )