Sliding Void
Authors: Stephen Hunt
Table of Contents
PRAISE FOR STEPHEN HUNT’S FICTION
CHAPTER ONE – Planet of the balls
CHAPTER TWO – World of winter, world of war
CHAPTER FOUR – The girl from nowhere
CHAPTER FIVE – A gift on leaving
The world of Hesperus. Six months later.
Excerpt from In The Company of Ghosts
Sliding Void
Sliding Void [1]
Stephen Hunt
Green Nebula Publishing (2011)
Rating:
★★★☆☆
Sliding Void (Book 1 of the Sliding Void science fiction series)
DESCRIPTION
Captain Lana Fiveworlds has a hell of a lot of problems.
She's sliding void in an ageing seven-hundred-year-old space ship, scrabbling around the edges of civilised space trying to find a cargo lucrative enough to pay her bills without proving so risky that it'll kill her. She's got an alien religious freak for a navigator, an untrustworthy android for a first mate, a disgraced lizard for a trade negotiator and a deserter from the fleet acting as her chief engineer.
And that was well before an ex-crewman turns up wanting Lana to rescue a barbarian prince from a long-failed colony world.
Unfortunately for Lana, the problems she doesn't know about are even more dangerous. In fact, they just might be enough to destroy Lana's rickety but much-loved vessel, the Gravity Rose, and jettison her and her crew into the void without a spacesuit.
But there's one thing you can never tell an independent space trader. That's the odds...
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stephen Hunt is the creator of the much-loved 'Jackelian' series, now on its 6th book, published across the world via HarperCollins alongside their other best-selling fantasy authors, George R.R. Martin, J.R.R. Tolkien, Raymond E. Feist and C.S. Lewis.
REVIEWS
Praise for Stephen Hunt's novels:
‘Hunt's imagination is probably visible from space. He scatters concepts that other writers would mine for a trilogy like chocolate-bar wrappers.’
- TOM HOLT
‘All manner of bizarre and fantastical extravagance.’
- DAILY MAIL
‘Compulsive reading for all ages.’
- GUARDIAN
‘Studded with invention.’
-THE INDENDENT
‘To say this book is action packed is almost an understatement… a wonderful escapist yarn!’
- INTERZONE
‘Hunt has packed the story full of intriguing gimmicks… affecting and original.’
- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
‘A rip-roaring Indiana Jones-style adventure.’
—RT BOOK REVIEWS
‘A curious part-future blend.’
- KIRKUS REVIEWS
‘An inventive, ambitious work, full of wonders and marvels.’
- THE TIMES
‘Hunt knows what his audience like and gives it to them with a sardonic wit and carefully developed tension.’
- TIME OUT
‘A ripping yarn … the story pounds along… constant inventiveness keeps the reader hooked… the finale is a cracking succession of cliffhangers and surprise comebacks. Great fun.’
- SFX MAGAZINE
‘Put on your seatbelts for a frenetic cat and mouse encounter... an exciting tale.’
- SF REVU
FORMAT
Novella - part 1 of a continuing, linked series.
THE SERIES SO FAR...
Part 1 - Sliding Void
Part 2 - Transference Station
Part 3 is coming soon
AGE ADVISORY
Age 15+ - mild violence and language.
READ THIS BOOK IF YOU LIKE THESE AUTHORS...
Douglas Adams
Neal Asher
Iain M. Banks
Jack Campbell
David Drake
Orson Scott Card
James S.A. Corey
Evan Currie
Peter F. Hamilton
Ric Locke
Dan Simmons
Charles Stross
David Weber
GENRES
Science fiction (space opera)
Adventure (scifi)
SLIDING VOID
Book 1 in the Sliding Void series.
First published in 2011 by Green Nebula Press
Copyright © 2011 by Stephen Hunt
Typeset and designed by Green Nebula Press
The right of Stephen Hunt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on a subsequent purchaser.
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PRAISE FOR STEPHEN HUNT’S FICTION
‘Hunt's imagination is probably visible from space. He scatters concepts that other writers would mine for a trilogy like chocolate-bar wrappers.’
- TOM HOLT
‘All manner of bizarre and fantastical extravagance.’
- DAILY MAIL
‘Compulsive reading for all ages.’
- GUARDIAN
‘Studded with invention.’
-THE INDENDENT
‘To say this book is action packed is almost an understatement… a wonderful escapist yarn!’
- INTERZONE
‘Hunt has packed the story full of intriguing gimmicks… affecting and original.’
- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
‘A rip-roaring Indiana Jones-style adventure.’
—RT BOOK REVIEWS
‘A curious part-future blend.’
- KIRKUS REVIEWS
‘An inventive, ambitious work, full of wonders and marvels.’
- THE TIMES
‘Hunt knows what his audience like and gives it to them with a sardonic wit and carefully developed tension.’
- TIME OUT
‘A ripping yarn … the story pounds along… constant inventiveness keeps the reader hooked… the finale is a cracking succession of cliffhangers and surprise comebacks. Great fun.’
- SFX MAGAZINE
‘Put on your seatbelts for a frenetic cat and mouse encounter... an exciting tale.’
- SF REVU
Also by Stephen Hunt
The Jackelian series
(HarperCollins Voyager in the UK/Macmillan Tor in the USA)
The Court of the Air
The Kingdom Beyond the Waves
Rise of the Iron Moon
Secrets of the Fire Sea
Jack Cloudie
From the Deep of the Dark
The Sliding Void series
Sliding Void
Transference Station
Red Sun Bleeding (coming soon)
The Agatha Witchley Mysteries: as Stephen A. Hunt
In the Company of Ghosts
The Plato Club
Secrets of the Moon (coming soon)
Other works
Six Against the Stars
For the Crown and the Dragon
The Fortress in the Frost
For links to these books, visit
http://www.StephenHunt.net
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter One – Planet of the balls.
Chapter Two – World of winter, world of war.
Chapter Four – The girl from nowhere.
Chapter Five – A gift on leaving.
CHAPTER ONE – Planet of the balls
That was the problem with aliens, mused Lana. They were so damn
alien
. Not all of them, of course. The one sitting to her left, Skrat, looked like a man-sized lizard, but he might as well have been human compared to the two things swinging opposite them. The negotiators from the world Lana’s ship was currently orbiting were a series of mushy orange spheres joined together by flesh-coloured webbing. No eyes, no mouth, no ears she could see – just two ape-sized arms they could walk on or use to swing across the chamber from the various cables dangling from the ceiling. She didn’t know where to look, when a back was as good as a front. Their minds were so fucked up and off the scale, that Lana’s attempts at trying to win a cargo for the return leg of her journey were being answered by a stream-of-consciousness ramble from the translation stick linked into her ship’s computer. The chatter might as well be dub poetry rather than a serious attempt at business, for all that she understood it.