H2Liftships- Beyond Luna and Backstory by Bob Freeman

tumblr_n6hno2qixr1sfxmouo1_500 H2LiftShips Volumes 1 and 2: H2LiftShips, a tech manual for a future - Imagine a world, exactly like ours, but different

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My review: 4/5 stars

About this Book:

H2LiftShips, a tech manual for a future
Imagine a world, exactly like ours, but different. Part Road-Trip, part solar sailing, always with food, gambling, jail, and pirates, not necessarily in that order. No: Aliens, Monsters, blasters, pyrotechnic computers, or Anti-Grav powered rockets. Yes: Lasers, Primates, Canines, Octopus, Space Travel via Solar Sails, and the rare Rocket Ship. No violence, except for the spinning meat bolas and asteroid pebbles coming to the defense of their home rock.

My review:

You expect a manual to be boring, even if it is a space manual. But this book was written with the narrative intricacies of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the galaxy. It is funny, it is technical, it has animal characters who are more into space traveling than the human. Each aspect of space travel (such as jet propulsion) is explained as if part of a tech manual but the writing style is such as if talking to a funny AI. I did not know what to expect before starting this book as I was promised “not a typical soap opera”, but not a cliché sci-fi either. I was glad it was neither. It was an interesting story set in a future where animals can do space travel alongside humans. They can communicate. Their species has developed. And in fact, the animal characters had more nuances than the human ones.
It is NOT a short book, so you would have to be really into sci-fi to develop an interest in this. But if you like Volume one, Volume two will read like a breeze.
So far, most of the sci-fi books I have read have either been a story of personal development, with just sci-fi elements thrown in to build a premise or a complete dystopian era of doom with the responsibility of saving the world resting on one’s shoulder. This was neither and I was glad. That doesn’t mean that it would be a hit with all the people who like that kind of story. The book is different, and so it shall have acceptability in a few people who enjoy such kind of quirky space stories (without the aliens.)