by S. K. Dunstall
Ace, 2018. 401 pages. Science Fiction.
What does a cargo space captain, a celebrity gene modder, and a seemingly innocuous engineer have in common? Usually nothing, but when Captain Roystan, a cargo runner who happens across a ship in the vastness of space, the salvage of which could be the find of a lifetime, he gets far more than he bargained for. When what he finds on that ship puts Roystan and his crew in the cross hairs of some of the most powerful players in the universe, he teams up with his ship engineer, Josune Arriola, who happens to be decked out with some of the most high-end bioware implants and Nika Rick Terry, a gene modder of unparalleled skill, to combat the forces that want nothing more than to destroy them all.
While being an action packed adventure with lost treasure and corporate espionage, Dunstall asks some big questions about technology and how it affects the perceptions we have of ourselves. With active, out patient, gene modding making it possible to switch around everything about yourself, how do we hold on to the fragments of our identity that were two or three mods ago? For one of the main characters, Roystan, this is an even bigger mystery as he finds he's been modded so much he may not be who he thinks he is.
To some degree, Stars Uncharted reads a little like an Indiana Jones movie (but in space), with the setup of a traditional cyberpunk novel where the corporations run everything and are the ultimate enemy, and a large injection of genetic engineering like in the Uglies series by Scott Westerfeld. While that may sound chaotic, Dunstall does a great job of squishing all those different genre pieces into a cohesive and enjoyable story.
SMM
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