Monday, August 29, 2016

A Most Auspicious Star - Martin L. Shoemaker

Martin L. Shoemaker is quickly becoming one of my favorite new science fiction writers. His e-book novella A MOST AUSPICIOUS STAR is the tale of a merchant clipper ship carrying tea in the Indian Ocean in the late Nineteenth Century that has a strange encounter with a being from another world. Spotting what at first looks like a falling star, the narrator, First Mate Geoffrey Mann, convinces his captain to investigate. The craft they find is like nothing the sailors have ever seen, and so is its occupant, an alien female that Mann winds up naming Ariel.

Naturally, complications arise from this, and the ship has more mundane but no less dangerous problems like being pursued by pirates. Shoemaker keeps things moving along nicely, and Geoffrey Mann is a very likable protagonist. I thoroughly enjoyed this one and will be on the lookout for more work by Martin L. Shoemaker. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I’ll be publishing one of his stories as part of an anthology that I hope will be out sometime this fall, and I liked that one a lot, too.)

2 comments:

Scott D. Parker said...

You had me at "...the tale of a merchant clipper ship carrying tea in the Indian Ocean in the late Nineteenth Century that has a strange encounter with a being from another world."

Adventuresfantastic said...

I keep hearing good things about him, and I have at least one of his ebooks on my phone. I will try to work it higher up into the queue.