When the derelict satellite ring nicknamed the Starfall begins to precess toward Earth, Mara Kereama—once an oceanographic data analyst in Wellington, now a low-orbit salvage pilot—sees currents where others see chaos. Hired to chart debris flows from Lyall Bay to the Earth–Moon L1 corridor, she and systems engineer Ishaan Qureshi model the swarm like a migrating storm front, their screens blooming with eddies and break lines. As governments argue and corporations hedge, an old brass compass on Mara's dash ticks in microgravity, asking which way is home.
On the platform Neptune's Arc beside the Lagrange Gate, the team plots a risky gambit: nudge the Starfall into safe capture using magnetized sails and timed mass drivers, treating orbit like ocean. But their simulations expose a hidden purpose—someone is using the chaos to smuggle a shuttered archive, the Kauri Seed, through the corridor—and Mara must choose between clean math and messy loyalties. In the silences between burns and the hiss of coolant, she reckons with the storm that took her sister off Kaikōura, discovering that the maps we make are also the ones we survive.
Samantha Taylor (b. 1985) is a New Zealand–based science fiction writer and former oceanographic data analyst. Raised in Halifax and trained in computational geophysics, she moved to Wellington in her mid-twenties and built a career turning satellite readings into visual models of currents and storms. Her short fiction has appeared in small independent magazines and anthologies, often blending hard science with lyrical, character-driven storytelling. She teaches part-time workshops on narrative design and lives near the south coast, where she hikes, repairs old compasses, and collects 20th-century star charts.
Screamed, cried, learned orbital mechanics, adopted a compass.
Gorgeous prose and meticulous physics, but the last-act explanation of the L1 gambit felt thin compared to the rich setup; still, the salvage slang and storm-mapping metaphors are worth the trip.
Taylor writes Wellington into orbit without ever naming it too loudly. Lyall Bay, southerly gusts, the memory of Kaikōura's torn water—those textures follow Mara to Neptune's Arc, where the hum of scrubbers and the flicker of the Starfall make a new kind of coastline.
What I loved most is how the team treats orbital debris like a living sea. The magnetized sails and mass drivers are cool, yes, but the true magic is watching Ishaan and Mara read the flow together, finding break lines, arguing over small shifts that become fate. The moment the Kauri Seed is revealed on a back channel had me gasping—of course chaos is a cover.
Also: the compass she fixes in chapter three and the star charts taped over the galley table. Those choices made the ending land with a thud in my chest.
I wanted lasers and pirate chases and instead got pages of vector fields and people staring at screens! Who cares about eddies in space or a compass ticking in zero-g when nothing blows up until the end? The whole Kauri Seed conspiracy felt like a side quest explained in hushed voices. Not my kind of sci-fi, sorry.
Ocean-brained hard SF with heart; I could hear the coolant hiss and taste salt in the solar wind.
Starfall Gambit is the rare near-future space novel that treats orbit like weather and makes you feel the lift and drag in your bones. Taylor's background hums through every page: the debris maps read like tide charts, the eddy lines around the Lagrange Gate are as tense and beautiful as a storm shelf over Cook Strait.
Mara Kereama won me in the quiet moments: the brass compass ticking beside a window full of shattered satellites, the way she reads the Starfall like she once read the Te Moana buoy array. When the Kauri Seed plot emerges, the moral currents grow as complex as the physical ones, and Taylor never lets the math drown the people inside it.
The final burns at Neptune's Arc had my palms sweating; the gambit is both clever and inevitable, and the last image—Mara making a new map—feels like a promise.
