When you are part of the crew of an interstellar transport ship, your life is… different. Those sneakers you bought not so long ago are “vintage” to new passengers.

“She hadn’t realized when she took this job how it would make her into something other, something distinct from humanity yet still technically human, but it had.”

I liked the characters in this story, everyone felt very flawed, very human, very real. Also, it’s nice to have people talk about shows and films that were made in this far future, and *not* Star Trek and whatnot.

There is a murder mystery onboard. Ace, our narrator, loves detective serials and starts taking matters into her own hands. But the mystery and its solution are not as important to the story as people and their relationships, their stories… and the void.

“Only – out here we’re all impossibly big,” she said. “Bigger than time. We watch kingdoms rise and fall. Names change. Fashions change. A thousand tiny cataclysms pass us by, and we see better than anybody, you know? That all things pass.”

P.S. This is an excellent short story – but why the hell are women still dying in childbirth this far into the future? It’s mentioned so casually, too :( ( )

This is a science fiction story because it's set in space, but that's really the only SF aspect to it. Otherwise, it is a mystery story. I enjoyed it, though honestly I found myself more interested in the setting than the plot. I wanted to know more about the ship, the different settlements, how humans discovered faster than light travel (even if the details weren't given in detail; I know that FTL is hard to do even in fiction), and why there weren't more ships taking advantage of the FTL capability. Very little world building background was provided, though there were enough hints that you can tell the author had more in her head than she put on paper.

As a mystery story, it was a pretty good one. There were hints, there were clues, there were misdirections. I liked the mystery part a lot. I just think that it was pushed as a science fiction story first, mystery second, because it happened to be set in space. It should have been mystery first, SF second. ( )

Void is the short story submission by Veronica Roth for the Far Reaches collection. Occurring in the void of space travel between planets, Void is as much a murder mystery as it is an examination of humankind in space. Ms. Roth's story also explores the phenomenon of time dilation and its impact on the human experience. Between its emptiness and the time dilation, space is one scary space. But, one can find solace in the fact that no matter where they happen to be, humans will always be humans. Ms. Roth's Void may not be as sobering as some of the other stories in the Far Reaches collection, but it does make you look at space as something other than the next frontier to overcome. ( )

On an interstellar cruise ship, a murder is uncovered and its up to a plucky maintenance worker to solve the crime. A pretty good story, sort of the ultimate locked room mystery. Nowhere to go when you're in deep space. Interesting how the time dilation takes affect and is part of the story. The worker's only been with the ship a couple "months", but actual decades have elapse back at home. ( )

Blown plot

Early on, right at 20% of the way through. And that's not the near misses of improbable, but flat out nonsense. ( )