Monaghan takes on a trope that’s fairly well explored : a colony spaceship with one person brought out of cryosleep due to an emergency. And he handles it well.
The main protagonist is Grayson Meihl, and it is through his perspective that we find out what has happened – a major explosion has damaged the ship, the AI, and knocked it off course, and he has spent over thirty years as a caretaker, keeping the ship ticking over as best he can as it hurtles onward into the void.
Grayson is in constant contact with the AI, and what works well is the way, after a few pages, we find out that Grayson isn’t the most reliable of narrators, and whilst the story doesn’t have any major twists and turns, it has a few minor course corrections, which is what happens to the ship and to Grayson himself, in a story with a good blend of sfnal and character-driven elements.
More from this issue here.
