Note: We read this book as an advanced review copy (ARC) given to our parent companies, everafterbooks.uk and theubergroup.org.
The coolest thing I noticed about the space thriller Inner Space was how setting the story in space made the people who work there more sympathetic and relatable (minor spoilers follow).
Lucy Hunt's entire career has led up to one thing: Commanding a mission to the International Space Station (ISS). She's highly qualified, intelligent, hardworking, and has the right blend of fairness and toughness needed to lead a diverse, strong-willed crew. But there's an important catch: an astronaut's life sucks on many levels.
The first part is the training. Not because of what astronaut training provides, but because of what it takes away: time. Time to be a partner, a parent, for self-reflection, or even decent sleep. An astronaut's life goes on pause for years while they load up their mind and body for a mission. Often just one mission. And everyone they know is along for the ride, whether they realize it or not.
Then there's the job itself. Sealed for months in a space station with the interior volume of a large classroom, crowded with gear, dirty laundry, and garbage. Shared with people that didn't choose to be with each other, breathing recycled air and drinking recycled urine. Hundreds of miles above the Earth, where a meteor strike or equipment failure could mean instant death. And don't get me started about the noise or what the place smells like after 25 years in orbit.
In other words: Astronauts trade the best years of their lives for a chance to live for a few months in a filthy, human-sized hamster maze with people they don't really know. And they could die at any time — on camera. Because all day, every day, astronauts are monitored by video from mission control stations on Earth, and every minute of those days is scheduled in advance by ground teams focused on maximum crew productivity.
It's hard work and, in this day and age, thankless, because the ISS and its astronauts are an expensive, orbiting monument to something that doesn't exist any more — a fleeting, post-cold war fantasy of global cooperation on space research and exploration. The training and work are no less demanding than they ever were, but the reality is that even schoolchildren are now more interested in the universe within their smartphones than the one beyond Earth's atmosphere.
All the above is true in Inner Space, of course, until the day it isn't. When communications go out, something goes wrong, and the world starts paying attention. When Lucy Hunt, the obedient, remote-controlled team player, must lead her crew to first save the ISS and, by the end, their own lives. And the difference between life and death comes down to skill, experience, and — most importantly — trust. Trust that Lucy must build with her international crew in the face of their secret agendas, and trust she desperately needs from loved ones on Earth.
This gets to what Inner Space delivers so effectively. Lucy Hunt has one of the most storied, challenging jobs in the world, so it would normally be hard to relate to her struggles and decisions. At least not without falling back on stereotypes from history or science fiction, which tend to be one-dimensional. But Inner Space reveals what life as a modern astronaut is really like, why some people still devote their adult lives to such a career, and how that devotion can be a very good thing.
On the heels of this, Inner Space gave me a sense of what enjoyable stories set in space that aren't specifically science fiction could be like. I think this is important because too much space-based fiction is mostly about the mechanics of survival in such an extreme environment. This leaves little room to get to know people involved and, in the end, makes space exploration itself seem less interesting and worthwhile.
Inner Space turns this on its head by being very much about people who happen to be astronauts. Exceptional people who are at the same time just like the rest of us. Even when they're very, very far from home.