From speculative storyteller Georgina H. Beck comes Starship Temporal, a taut spacefaring novel about a salvage crew who inherit a mothballed research frigate and its half-built time-hop drive. While the Kuiper Belt reels from a trade war, pilot Rhea Santos, ship-monk Brother Hal, and an AI archivist called Lintel recommission the CFR Larkspur at Ceres Dock 11 to run quiet courier routes through the Sagittarius Gate. There's just one problem. Someone - or something - is poisoning the Larkspur's causality ledger with fabricated incident reports from futures that never occurred, tripping safety locks that could maroon them outside time. Can they unmask the phantom scribe across branching logs, halt the recursive sabotage, and keep their license before the Agency grounds them and the ship tears itself apart?
Promising premise, uneven delivery.
If you enjoy the pragmatic camaraderie found in Linda Nagata and the puzzle-box engineering of Marina J. Lostetter, this lands somewhere between, with steadier warmth than the former and fewer fireworks than the latter. The quiet competence of the crew shines, though a few corridors of the mystery feel longer than needed.
Starship Temporal keeps circling trust, faith in records, in shipmates, and in systems that can be gamed. The novel asks who gets to decide what "incident reports" count as truth, and what it means to maintain conscience when the evidence arrives from futures that never were.
The Kuiper Belt trade war hums in the background while Ceres Dock 11, Agency certifications, and the Sagittarius Gate make the logistics feel lived-in. The time-hop tech reads grounded, with cautious safety locks and irritating bureaucracy that convincingly shape the stakes.
Rhea, Brother Hal, and the AI archivist Lintel feel distinct, and their frictions are gentle rather than melodramatic. What sold me are the small gestures, the monk's ritual checklists, Rhea's clipped radio shorthand, Lintel's courteous footnotes, which keep the crew human even when the ship threatens to slip sideways in time.
Beck leans on alternating incident logs and cockpit scenes to pace the story. Structure: the braided timeline of the Larkspur's ledger entries intrigues, but the midsection thins as redacted memos stack up and blur cause and effect.
Reviving the CFR Larkspur, a salvage crew races through causality lockdowns as a phantom future writes them into traps, and the result is a lean, tense mystery that marries hard SF mechanics with sly humor.
