Void

Book 6 in the Far Reaches collection

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This short story that has some interesting ideas in it about time but, ultimately, it's a murder mystery that I didn’t enjoy very much.

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She flexed an arm, a hand. Turned herself not toward the bright spark of Sol, and not toward Proxima Centauri, but toward void. She felt a familiar horror. It was so empty out there that the darkness wrapped around you like a blanket, smothering. Odd that you could be in the expanse to define all expanses—what the astropoets called the “Big Empty”—and still feel claustrophobic, but the mind was not built to comprehend such endlessness. Humans liked containers.

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The characters are not very well sussed out so we don’t really care about what happens to them, and the murder itself isn’t sussed very well either so we don’t care about the clues that lead to the killer.

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I feel the author missed an opportunity with this. If she would have pursued the implications and consequences of the ideas she put forward related to time, this would have been fascinating. But then, it would have been a different story.

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Not recommended.

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