Hydra One by Jake Theriault
Blurb:
Decades after losing contact with the distant Praeter System, a mysterious burst of energy is detected in Neptune’s orbit; and JCA Hydra One is sent to investigate. But all they find when they arrive is a ghost ship - cold and abandoned - all alone in the night, at least until the stars around Neptune begin to tear...
Review:
This book is great, because, despite it being book two, the amount of time between book one and two is vast enough that reading order is more or less ignorable. As for a timely review, this is not, and for that I apologize.
Without further ado, if I had to sell this book to someone who loves space operas, I’d give them this:
“Due to his past, Max Hillis is cut more slack than most in the fleet, with that rankling some, leading to dire consequences for everyone.”,
before mentioning that it is very much set within our distant future, with space travel being common, and that this is more a suspense and build up kind of story.
To start off, we have Max Hillis, who got run through the ringer in the last novel, with some deep, personal trauma that distanced him from his parents, as well as giving him a rather insane death wish. Which leads to him getting yelled at a lot by the higher ups. Throughout the whole story, he slowly works through his trauma and he opens up to his squadron a bit more.
After that, we have a rather suspenseful plot. It starts off with an abandoned ship, and then turns into a suspenseful takeover of all systems, leaving Max Hallis and his squadron with little room to manoeuvre. And through it all, it drops small hints of the first novel, but doesn’t do a whole lot of retelling of what happened in “The Hollow Sun”. Overall though, it follows one path and that path is full of various landmines and wrenches being thrown from all sides.
Next, there's the worldbuilding within this novel. There is no map, but we need no map for where we are going, for this takes place in the solar system, primarily. With another solar system separated by a long distance after an incident. And those people are primarily pretty upset after that incident, which is understandable. The novel does a good job showing the differences between the two solar systems after the incident in news clips and whatnot.
Lastly, if I had to gripe about one thing in “Hydra One”, it’d be the feeling of deja vu over the ship scenes. And that deja vu was over the extreme Space die hard vibes I was getting. However, that might be different for everyone, so it’s a RAFO situation.
As always, thank you for reading this somewhat overdue review, and I hope I’ve helped add another book to the TBR pile, or a next read for someone. If not, don’t fret, we have plenty of reviews here on SFF Insiders, with anything between this and an epic fantasy novel. Here is a link to a random review on the site, probably a story wildly different from this one. Who knows? You’d have to click it.
Wherever you are reading this, have a wonderful good morning, good afternoon, good evening and good night!
