Barbary Station

Everyone who likes SF should read this.

You want a fairly classic space opera story, with a ruined and murderous station, the aftermath of a war, pirates, mercenaries, and a strong mystery? Good.

A story that takes those tropes and settings and makes them fresh and cool again? All right then.

Space opera that pays as much attention to air filters and interpersonal communication as it does to space walks and gun fights? That’s character driven? Great.

All of the above, but GAY? And DIVERSE? With FEMALE protagonists? *rubs hands*

Adda and Iridian are awesome and I loved their relationship—which isn’t “lesbians fall in love” by the way. It’s “lesbians have been in love for some time.” And all the other characters are great, even show more if we only see them briefly, and there’s a great spread of diversity—Chinese, Latino, and Black characters; queer characters including but not limited to the agender bi/pan pirate captain; Adda’s blind brother; and Iridian’s Middle Eastern heritage. Also nobody gives a damn about any of the above, though there are still a few moments that suggest acceptance isn’t totally perfect or universal.

And the plot? I seriously meant it about it about this being character driven. So much of the book is them talking to people, and how psychologically devastated everyone on the station is, and how terrified people do irrational things and refuse to share information. Also, Stearns has a great gasp of tension and when to up the stakes and how to slip information in that tells you next to nothing but also has you screaming “oh my god.” The second Adda and Iridian dock at the station, they are in shit and it just gets worse from there.

Also the hacking scenes are really cool. And I’ll never not be delighted that their motivation for all this is to pay off their student loans.

The one flaw for me is that I got lost a few times during the climax, but I’m not sure whether this is Stearns’ fault (rushed it, couldn’t balance everything perfectly, etc., though the balancing was really good considering how much was going on) or my fault for having to go to work partway through or for reading so quickly I missed stuff. We’ll class that as “whatever” and move on….

Okay, done blithering now, except I’m not. 🙂

Warnings: Violence, gore, hallucinations, drug use, murder, illness of the coughing, oozing variety, other moments of body horror, tense scenes.

9/10 show less

This is a story about two women in love who decide to become space pirates, and then discover they have to take control of a scary AI to achieve their piracy dreams. In other words, I should have adored this. I should have eaten it up with a spoon.

I did not.

The thing is, there is a good book hiding in here, but it needed to be found, and it wasn’t. The book that actually exists is a mess. There’s a huge cast of characters, most of whom are barely introduced (and if they are introduced, there’s a good chance they’re about to die), let alone described. That is, except for one character (Vick), who is introduced four times in successive chapters, each time in exactly the same words. And, worse, because the cast is so unwieldy and show more Stearns struggles so much with making each of the characters real, she often goes for the cheap shot instead of the well-constructed emotional note. This means, for example, that she introduces a kid just so she can kill her off for the emotional impact. (Multiple child deaths in this one, by the way.) She only gives most characters meaningful dialogue in the pages before they die. It comes off as trite and cheap, and it makes it hard to care about any of them.

There’s also a ton of continuity errors, including a point where a blind character reads text off a screen (and I don’t really want to get into the Tragedy of Disability narrative that plays out with this character, except to say that as a disabled reader I was not a fan of it). The characters seem to forget crucial, basic pieces of information — like, a supposedly intelligent group of people fighting an unknown infectious agent just ... forgets to contact their doctor allies. For chapters. Because plot reasons, I guess? And there are minor problems, too. There’s chunks of repeated text and sentences that are confusing because they’re missing words. Midway through, I actually checked to see if this was a self-pubbed novel, since those sometimes don’t get edited very well. (It’s actually published by Saga Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Clearly I need to stop thinking traditional publishing = any promise of quality editing.)

Or, to summarize this book by milestones: at 15%, I text my friend who was thinking of reading it that she should not do that thing. At 22%, I started texting her angry updates about the book. At 44%, I started making frustrated editorial comments in my ebook. By 60%, this was a straight-up grudgeread.

And this is all so sad, because I wanted to love this book. And I think I could have loved this book. It just ... needed a lot of help that it didn’t get. I might read future novels by this author, but wow, I don’t recommend anyone read this one. show less

That it's taken me this long to get to this novel in regards to its publication date is probably a commentary on my suspicion that there is no way that it could be as cool as the high concept of it all: Lesbian pirates in space! This is reinforced by the sense that this novel mostly didn't find an audience when the iron was hot.

Moving forward from 2017 to 2025, my suspicion is that this story fell between stools of communities of readers: Too nuts-and-bolts for people looking for a found-family story, too much relationship building for those wanting a crisp thriller. As for what I think this novel really needed that might have been another POV character to act as a foil to Iridian and Adda, our wannabe space pirates; maybe the pirate show more captain, maybe the leader of the mercenaries sent to deliver retribution to the hijackers.

The best thing that Stearns had going for her is the arc of dealing with the AI defense systems that are preventing the denizens of said Barbary Station from escaping, as that is where the really interesting developments happen. How those developments play out is what makes me interested in the follow-up books. show less

This review and others posted over at my blog.

Lesbian space pirates versus a murderous AI? Sign me the hell up! The result left me feeling conflicted, however. Buckle up!

We’re immediately thrust into the story and Adda and Iridian’s dreams for their future, all of which intrigued me. The action throughout the book is kept at a fairly steady pace – Adda’s introverted and tech-minded observations are offset by Iridian’s near constant action scenes. Once the couple is aboard the ship, there’s a lot going on. The pirates are living in the walls in order to stay alive, a bunch of refugees who left their planet after a war are living inside parameters set by the AI and there’s a handful of doctors the ship seems to want to show more protect.

For the most part, I found it easy to imagine what was happening, but when it came to the general layout of the station, most notably any scenes taking place on its surface, I was utterly lost. I would have loved a map (or maps!) of the ship to get a better handle on where everyone was traveling to and from. In those cases, I just imagined an amalgamation of various space stations I’ve seen in movies, but it took me out of the story to have to do so.

I loved the unsettling tone set early on by the AI – I’m a sucker for “evil AI” plots, the creepier the better! Nothing quite so frightening as imagining floating through the deadly darkness of space inside of a machine hell-bent on killing you. (Note: It wasn’t until photographing the book that I noticed the A and I in the title were highlighted – clever!) The AI in this book, known as AegiSKADA, considers the pirates to be the biggest threat and is constantly sending drones to kill them if they leave their hideout and eventually its tactics evolve to more sinister means. AegiSKADA does still want to keep the station intact however and must do its best not to do too much damage when exterminating the pests (hence why it doesn’t just bomb an entire portion of the ship). Iridian and Adda’s presence only upsets it further.

I found the rest of the cast to be less interesting than the AI, with the exception of Iridian. She and Adda are ridiculously opposite. Iridian is a tall, dark-skinned, bald, well-muscled, boisterous, ex-soldier with a really cool, high-tech battleshield. Adda is a short, light-skinned, red and purple haired, self-consciously curvaceous, socially awkward, techie with what’s essentially a hardware jack in her nostril. I couldn’t understand why they were together – they clearly cared about each other (or Adda attempted to worry about Iridian when she wasn’t in a drug-induced tech trance) but I could never get a sense of what brought them together, or kept them together. They felt more like friends than lovers, and while this doesn’t largely affect the story, their relationship felt out of place.

Iridian has enough personality for two main characters and I friggen loved her. She’s strong, smart and won’t take any shit, unless of course she has to, for the betterment of her and Adda’s future. She knows when to stand down and when to kick ass. In contrast, Adda seemed put upon any time she had to interact with a human other than Iridian (or sometimes even Iridian) and spent much of her time in a drugged state to achieve a deeper connection with AegiSKADA. She’s a sort of hacker (the book describes her skill far better than I could), but in order to get into the ship’s systems she has to take a drug and then plug into the system so she can manipulate it in her workspace (I’ll come back to that.) Adda just fell flat for me.

Adda’s brother, Pel, has a few interesting scenes, but was mostly the clichéd troublemaker. The crew was too large to get to know. There were some diverse relationships among the members and the Captain’s gender is never declared (the Captain also had some fabulous sounding outfits), but I couldn’t bring myself to care what happened to any of them.

So, Adda’s workspace: her specialty in systems engineering has led her to get implants that allow her to literally connect herself to a machine’s systems. In order to concentrate she takes drugs and enters a strange state of mind where the information she is looking for becomes a surreal, interactive experience. For example, during one session the information was presented in the form of moths and other bugs, pinned to the wall as though preserved by an entomologist. Clouds of undead bugs would then flicker and move about the room and at one point something bloody hit a window? It was like reading a strange dream (or nightmare, in my book.) I loved this mix of human and computer and I’ve never read anything quite like it.

What lost me much of time, however, was all the technical talk. I’m assuming Stearns knows what she’s talking about, because it’s all Greek to me. Sometimes I can gloss over these details and just accept that stuff is happening because people know way more about science and technology than I do. Other times I get caught up and confused, struggling to make sense of the words on the page. This was one of those times. This certainly won’t be an issue for everyone though.

In the end, this was a middle of the road read for me. I expected to be blown away, but the tech-talk made it a dense, slow read and the characters were lackluster. Iridian is awesome though and AegiSKADA was as creeptastic as I could have hoped for, so it balanced out. If you like a lot of science and technology in your sci-f and you love AI-driven plots, certainly check this out.

I received this book for free from Geek Girl Authority in exchange for my honest review. show less

After reading this book, I had only one question. Was I entertained? Yes, I was. This book is more like a film that plays in your head as you read it. At least that's what was happening in my head. But, I have watched a lot of science fiction in my time. If you're looking for deep and meaningful, then this is not your book. However, if you're after an easy read to satisfy your 'inner space-opera nerd' then you could do a lot worse.

This needed a better editor. The narration is disjointed, the dialogue splintered, and the level of detail swings between too much and not enough.

Interested in a novel where lesbian space pirates fight a rogue AI? Then Barbary Station is the book for you.

Adda and Iridian decided that the best hope for their future lies in piracy. How else could they pay off their student debt? So they concoct a plan to get in with a piracy crew on Barbary Station, stealing a colony ship’s worth of supplies to prove their value. But once they arrive on Barbary Station, nothing is what they expected. The pirates aren’t living in luxury but are hiding in a base rigged to the exterior of the station, traveling through the cracks and crannies of the station, always on the lookout. For the station might have been abandoned, but the security AI was never shut off. It’s decided that the pirates — show more and a group of refugees also on the station — are intruders, and it’s willing to use lethal force to get rid of them. Oh, and it shoots down any ship that attempts to leave. Adda, Iridian, and the rest of the pirates are doomed to a slow death, unless they can deal with the AI once and for all.

I enjoyed Barbary Station, but I also felt like it could have been better. Probably the biggest area for improvement is in the characters. All of the characters could be stronger, Adda and Iridian included. I’m glad the book chose to have them in an established romantic relationship (why don’t more books do this?), but I also would have liked to get more of a sense of what they saw in each other, why they’re together, that sort of thing. As is, I sort of felt like I was being told they loved each other without ever really feeling it.

However, it’s the supporting cast who really need more development. Probably the two most prominent are Adda’s younger brother, Pel, and the pirate captain, Sloane. Pel felt sort of like a character type — the cocky but lovable younger brother, but it worked all right. I would have liked to see more about Sloane, who’s this sort of mysterious figure hovering over the entire book. I got the impression there was some stuff going on with the Captain (important backstory?), but we never find out what. Maybe it’s being saved for the sequel? As for the rest of the cast, they never made much of an impression. And I think they need to, especially if Stearns wants those character deaths to have impact.

Plot-wise, Barbary Station could have been streamlined. I felt like there was some lulls in the pace, and I thought the story called for a consistently high pace and action that drives everything forward. There were a few spots where I could feel myself getting bored, especially in the beginning. Thankfully, the second half engaged my interest more.

I did like the overall set up with the killer AI. Pretty soon, Adda starts asking whether or not the AI’s awakened. In the language of the book, that means whether or not the AI’s become sentient. Supposedly, it’s not unknown, but awakened AI’s are always immediately destroyed. I liked the way Barbary Station dealt with the topic, and I’m interested to see where the sequel takes it.

And yes, I am planning on reading the sequel. For all its flaws, I found Barbary Station an enjoyable read. It’s not bad for a debut novel, and I’d love to see how R.E. Stearns grows as a writer with future books.

Review from The Illustrated Page. show less