Review: The characters are well drawn
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 05 23, 2014
Get past the awkward title. The name of the space craft is “Endurance” and the new captain, Captain Thomas Withers, has to endure his time on the ship.“Endurance” has become the dumping ground for the United Earth Law enforcement (UELE) Corps. It is variously called the “Misfit”, the “Dead End”, the “Quacker Barrel” and Withers has been promoted to its Captain as punishment for putting the life of a hostage ahead of the success of a five-year operation.Add a crew of out of this world characters and a janitor – sorry, “Cleaning Enforcement Specialist” – who seems to know much more than you’d expect him to, and you got a pretty good tale.The “Endurance’s” remit is to patrol around Neptune, staying out of everybody’s way and out of trouble. A boring way to end a career, but Withers has plans to shape up the crew with some old-fashioned discipline, and angle a transfer off to a better ship.Then his Chief Engineer, Matthias Habassa, finally gets a decades old experiment to work and *pop*, they’re 20 light years away. The first Earth ship to leave the solar system.The adventures experienced while sourcing more minerals needed to make the trip home make up the best part of the story.And this is a short story. At roughly 22k words it was an easy single sitter. Amy Spahn appears to be creating a series of these. I’ve bookmarked the next one. It looks like it will be a good read also.The characters are well drawn, although the Captain is a bit too morose for a bit too long (the only thing, in my opinion, keeping it from being a full 5-star). The ship and world is believable and the pace fantastic. I’ve got no problem giving Enduring Endurance a solid 4 stars.