Dark Dweller by Gareth Worthington

I needed this book like a gulp of fresh air. There is this fizzy electrostatic air about sci-fi books that just makes my heart warm and cosy like if I’m a fully charged taser ready to fight and defend our universe. Maybe it’s the fact that I grew up watching Stargate with my father or being an absolute fan of Firefly but oh man I love a good science fiction book. And if it’s a series even better. Gareth Worthington’s Dark Dweller is ticking every necessary box for a good story and even managed to get new categories as well. The characters are hilarious, the female characters are not annoyingly feminine or masculine and vice versa. The science is there and the additional bits and pieces are just the cherry on top

‘Space whales, AI confronting humans about consciousness, a 100-year-old child talking about the Six and the fulcrum, black holes and/or wormholes and even Greek mythology managed to squeeze itself into the team. just to mention a few this is what made me do a happy dance in my head every time when I sat down with this book in between my study sessions. Never a boring page; something always happens, and every inner monologue has the perfect length. Not too long, not too short. The narratives are jumping from one main character to another but there are no more than 3 of them so it’s easy to follow the storyline and the characters as well. 

We start out with a space crew who are on their way to Jupiter to ‘capture’ some helium. Because that’s what space capitalism looks like and our crew is trying its best to finish the ‘mission’  in a record year’s time. We start out with Dr Sarah Dallas who is the psychiatrist on the ship and a nepo baby. Meaning: the child of the wealthiest family in future space colonialism, the heir of the Interplanetary Transport Network. This little detail gives enough for one or (secretly more) of the crew members to hate her even though she is actually a very nice and humble person. So you have the necessary fight factor in the book between the crew members which is a must when you are being enclosed together in a tin can for years. The crew is very diverse both in dialect and in personality as well. You can see the story evolving into a movie in your mind’s eye. Back to the storyline: as the crew is trying to grab some helium from the gas giant Jupiter, they find an escape pod near it. As protocol dictates, they have to check on it. And when they do they find a floating girl with a fierce fighting spirit. When they take her back to the ship which by the way has the cool name Parsalus, it turns out that the girl is quite well-known. So much so that she is actually a high-lighted character in the ‘history books’ as the former Captain Kara Psomas who died in the Proxima mission (see Jupiter) a hundred years ago with her whole crew being burned up in the atmosphere. But thanks to some mind-bending science ( I can’t spoil that for you) and space magic she is not even alive but appears to be impersonating Benjamin Button better than he himself. Now the crew has to figure out what the hell is going on. 

I absolutely loved this book to pieces. It was fascinating, full of amazing and frankly trippy science that I am hopelessly passionate about since I’m studying Astronomy and Planetary Science. And on top of that gives you enough fantasy and spiritual elements to truly enjoy the book for what it is and makes you think about the BIG questions from a different angle. And I can not stress this enough, it was a rollercoaster. Not a single page could be categorized as a filler. Just full of facts, action, reasoning, hilarious dialogues and something new to learn on almost every page. Gareth Worthington is not just an excellent author and storyteller but a genius teacher.