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Starliner (a preview)


Last week I said I would give a preview of my upcoming novel Starliner. So that’s what this blog is today. The challenge is to do so in a way that is spoiler free. You don’t have to go terribly far into the novel before you start to hit some plot points that I can’t talk about without giving out spoilers. Oh well, here goes:

Starliner is a science fiction novel set several hundred years in the future. The main character, Jan Stot, is a young man who has graduated from a performing arts college on his home planet of Flose. But Jan finds that getting a job in the entertainment industry is nearly impossible. On a lark, he applies for a job as an entertainer on a star liner that is making runs to the new colony world of Asbos. He is offered the job, but is somewhat daunted by the fact that it is a six month round trip. Still, he needs something to put on his resume, and he has never been off planet before, so he takes the job.

On board the ship, he meets the other four entertainers who have been hired. The five of them together make up the entertainment ‘crew’, and their job is to provide diversion and recreation to the passengers. Jan himself is an actor and singer, the other members of the crew are: Sara, who is a singer and is the ‘crew chief’, Simon, who is a magician and comedian, Tanya who is a dancer, and Redd, who is a singer. They form a bond, which is a good thing, because they have some difficult times to get through down the line.

A murder happens on the ship while it is in deep space. A liner is not really equipped to handle a murder investigation. There are a few private security guards, but no one with police or investigatory backgrounds. So the first Officer, Lieutenant Rawl, is put in charge of the investigation. The entertainment crew are initially suspects, but once it is proven that they are the only ones on the ship who could not possibly have committed the murder, they actually become participants in the investigation. There. I haven’t really given too much away, but that is about as far as I can go.

Space ships and a far flung future, land this story into the subgenre of science fiction called ‘space opera’. The space opera was all the rage in the pulp science fiction days of the 1930’s and 1940’s but started to go out of fashion (at least in print) in the 1950’s. I think Science fiction authors wanted to be taken more seriously and to tackle more complex social and technological problems. This was good. It expanded the breadth of science fiction. But the space opera has made a comeback in the past few decades. And why not? It’s fun.

I think that Starliner is fun, but at the same time, Jan Stot has to wrestle with some difficult moral choices. But that is what science fiction is all about isn’t it? It’s not just about technology, speculation, and far flung adventures, but how humans deal with it. Ultimately it is the choices that we make that define what kind of humans we become.

Note: The novel Starliner by Scott Branchfield, published by Copypasta Publishing, will be available as an E-book by the end of this month, and it will be available in paperback in October.

Star Liner

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