An intriguing science fiction novella by James McLean, offering a taste of things to come.

I received a copy of this book after the author ran a giveaway on Twitter around its release, and I was thrilled (and surprised) to have won! Carrion Crew is a sci-fi novella by James McLean, who you may remember as one of the authors I recently interviewed. It is the first in an upcoming anthology of novella-length works set in this universe, telling smaller stories surrounding humanity’s war with an alien species known as the Shells. So let’s get into the review:

Blurb

With humanity's manufacturing in shambles, scavengers have become a staple for continued maintenance in the war against the Shells. Kel Wardlaw, a young cutter, is hired for a scavenging job that sees him leaving home for the first time and setting foot on an unexplored alien planet to try and gather enough materials to help with the war effort back home.

Carrion Crew is the first in an upcoming novella anthology, by up and coming author James McLean, that looks to tell the smaller stories of a fictional war. In his novella, Carrion Crew, we see the story of a scavenger as he does his duty for the troops back home. In other upcoming novellas, we will see stories from shipbound engineers, bridge crew, fighter pilots, civilians, and even survivors of conflicts where the Shells had hit their hardest. Did we mention that you will be able to read these in any order you want?

Enjoy the first step of this series, and please, keep your eyes peeled for more bite-sized tales from the Void In-Between.

Review

Carrion Crew is on the shorter side for a novella, but packs in a great deal of excellent worldbuilding and intriguing concepts. The plot is fairly low-stakes, at least as far as it affects our immediate cast of characters and it definitely feels like the setup for something much bigger. There’s a lot of cool imagery in the story as our main character, Kel, explores an alien city on a distant planet, scavenging its strange technology, and you get a real sense of the wonder of exploring the unknown. It’s another of those works where the description of the alien landscape and technology encapsulate the feeling of looking at a John Harris sci-fi painting, though here it’s less ethereal and more about the kinds of people that might work behind the scenes on that fantastical technology, getting themselves stuck-in, gritty and dirty. The author also does a good job making the setting both otherworldly and familiar, as though the alien residents of this long-abandoned city were not quite so different from us as you might presume.

The character work here is very good. We’ve got a ragtag bunch of scavengers, hard-working, dependable; some older and grizzled, some younger and full of life. On the whole they’re an immensely likable bunch, and through their interactions, any sense of unease about their strange circumstances gives way to one of optimism despite the distant backdrop of a desperate interstellar war.

At the same time, there’s a warning here about our own future and reliance on technology that I found quite poignant.

Overall it was enjoyable to read and I’ll be looking out for this novella anthology the author is creating. I do like a good short story collection. Anyway, for Carrion Crew, it’s something I would happily recommend to sci-fi fans, and I think it’ll especially shine alongside a collection of other works set in the same universe.