The Javelin Program by Derin Edala

Blurb:

When Dr Aspen Greaves signed up for the Javelin Program, humanity's first foray into colonising deep space, they expected to wake up to life in a thriving colony on a distant planet. Instead, they find themself five years away from their destination on a broken spaceship full of complex mysteries, dead astronauts, and a very unhelpful AI.

Aspen wasn't trained for any of this. But if they can't keep themselves alive, get the ship in working order, and find out what went wrong by unravelling a chain of mysteries leading all the way back to distant Earth, then neither Aspen nor the five thousand sleeping passengers in their care will ever see a planet again.

Review:

I will summarize my review of Derin Edala’s excellent The Javelin Program with what I think is probably the most important data point: I read this almost 600 page book in under four days. Storygraph says my average completion time across all the books I’ve read this year is two months, so to have completed such a dense text in four days should tell you something about how much I enjoyed The Javelin Program. 

I knew nothing about The Javelin Program when I bought it. It was suggested and chosen for a bi-monthly book club in which I participate; so I bought it sight-unseen and prepared to read it the week before the club’s meeting date. I was thrilled to discover within the opening pages that The Javelin Program exists in one of my favorite sub-genres of sci-fi: fixing the problem in space. I’ve mentioned my enjoyment of these kinds of stories here on the blog (see: my reviews of Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama and Chris Hadfield’s The Apollo Murders), and so those of you like me will immediately click with The Javelin Program (and though I still have yet to read it all the way through, I think that fans of Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary will likely love The Javelin Program as well). And, as the opening chapters of The Javelin Program reveal, there is a whole heck of a lot aboard the Courageous that needs fixing!

The opening pages of the story will feel familiar to genre enthusiasts: Aspen Greaves awakens aboard an empty spaceship, some amount of time through an interstellar voyage. Critical components aboard the ship need a human touch, and Aspen is the only one able to provide it (or so the onboard computer says). What follows over the next 576 pages is a slow, steady unravelling of the tightly interwoven mystery of what happened aboard the starship Courageous during the decades in which Aspen was asleep. Other crew members are awakened as the story advances, but for each question answered during their explorations of the Courageous, myriad others are born. If ever I was to describe a book as a “page-turner,” it is this one. I could not wait to see what new secrets were hidden within the Courageous' unexplored passages. 

On that note, I think it is in the unraveling of the mystery of the Courageous that highlights Edala’s particular excellence as a storyteller. I’ve rewritten this paragraph a couple of times now, because what I’m going to talk about sounds awfully pedestrian no matter how I put it; but what I am about to describe just works so completely in this story I couldn’t help but be thrilled any time it happened. All throughout The Javelin Program, Edala teases out various bits of what happened aboard the Courageous prior to the first page of the book, and every time we learn something new, despite how we may not understand exactly how or why it happened, there is a certain matter-of-fact-ness about the details that always cemented an “Okay, I get it. This was a [good/bad] thing for [x/y] reason” feeling in my mind. And yet, almost without fail, Edala would recontextualize that detail later and completely upend my understanding of it. My supposedly concrete understanding of whatever Sword of Damocles or another had been hanging over the crew of the Courageous then bloomed into exciting new “Ohhhhhhh!” exclamations as this new context revealed other previously unseen Swords ready to drop at any moment! These reversals were always thrilling (and I can’t wait to see what the sequel has in store). 

Another bit of the story I particularly enjoyed was how it speculated about humankind’s future. We often talk about the subset of sci-fi known as “speculative fiction”, but I would go further to clarify that The Javelin Program is almost a form of speculative anthropology or sociology (Aspen Greaves, the protagonist, is a sociologist, after all—and so enjoys a good bit of inner-monologued observations about the lives of the crew of the Courageous). The civilization about which the story is written is so far into the future that essentially all the cultural mores of the various people groups represented in the text are completely different from any we have in contemporary culture. I understand that this too, may sound awfully pedestrian, as there are a great many sci-fi stories out there that develop their own cultures from whole cloth; but trust me that there is something about the way Edala does it that makes it feel so much more like they’ve peered into a real future and written their observations of it rather than have merely speculated about where humanity may be headed. And the far-future setting allows for much intriguing commentary about our current culture and history (a conversation about 1993’s Doom was a particular hit amongst our book club).

My only complaint about The Javelin Program is that it ends on a kind of cliffhanger that feels less like a solid conclusion and more a pause between story beats. I have already ordered the sequel—The Antarctica Conspiracy—and it has shipped and I can’t wait to get my hands on it. But as it stands, I feel like in order to recommend The Javelin Program I need to recommend you also get the sequel so that you can get the whole picture. The Javelin Program is excellent, with a richly developed world and an exciting cast of compelling characters; but it does feel a touch incomplete as its own story. It does not conclude so much as it ends. However, the paperback of The Antarctica Conspiracy is supposedly even longer than The Javelin Program, and so I understand not wanting to smack readers over the head with a 1,200 page doorstopper. Two books of relatively equal length is a much easier ask. And I repeat: I am beyond excited to continue this story. 

I know Edala has a number of other stories out there outside of this Time to Orbit: Unknown series, and they’ve completely earned my trust as a reader. I will definitely be seeking out more of their work once I complete The Antarctica Conspiracy. I’m thrilled to have found another great indie author for my shelf!