Blog tour: The Driftborn by Simon Bullock

This post is part of a blog tour organised by TheWriteReads. I received a free copy of the book in return for an honest review.

‘A forgotten wreck. A forbidden map. A gate that should never have been opened.

‘On the salvage moon of Veyra’s Fall, Kade Renn only wants one thing: a working air filter for his sick sister, Lira.

‘Instead, he finds a buried courier ship older than the official history books. Inside it is a dying Driftborn pilot, a forbidden star map, and a message from Kade’s mother, Elian, who supposedly died nine years ago.

‘The Directorate says the gates saved civilisation. It says the Driftborn are criminals, free-route smugglers and a threat to every recognised human world.

‘The Directorate is lying.

‘Forced to flee with Lira, their strange scrap-mech Nix, and a half-illegal ship called The Moth, Kade is pulled into a hidden war over the true origin of the gates. The deeper they travel beyond authorised space, the more dangerous the truth becomes.

‘The first crossing was not what humanity was taught.

‘The gates were not built by us.

‘And something has been waiting for us to understand what we woke.’

In The Driftborn, 26-year-old mechanic Kade Renn enters the out-of-bounds scrapyards of Veyra’s Fall, his home moon, to find a decent air filter for his teenage sister Lira, who has a respiratory condition. What he finds leads him to question everything he’s ever been taught about the universe.

Veyra’s Fall is part of the jurisdiction of the Directorate, an authoritarian government that does nothing to make life comfortable or enjoyable for those living on the dusty moon, strictly controls space travel for “safety”, and portrays those who reject their rule and live and work in space – the Driftborn – as an irresponsible threat to order.

Kade and Lira’s mum, Elian, supposedly died in an industrial fire nine years previously, so it’s a surprise to say the least when Kade and his colleague Mara uncover a vintage spaceship containing a dying pilot (Veyra) who knew Elian, as well as a black shard that projects an illegal map of the stars and speaks in Elian’s voice.

With the authorities closing in, Kade, Mara, Lira, and their quirky scrap-mech Nix follow the shard’s navigation into space, where a whole other world of trouble and danger awaits them.

I found The Driftborn really imaginative! Without giving too much away, I was particularly captivated by the notion of the entities – the shard, the emergency archive, the Central Core – that require Kade and Lira’s biological signatures to function; the modular Ashen Orchard, where a number of Driftborn live; the behaviour of the observer and the gates; and the messages they convey about human reactions to the unfamiliar.

Not unlike A Fugitive’s History of the Known Universe, by Nadia Afifi or D. Harrigon’s Desolation series (starting with The Overdue Library), this book falls into the ‘space colonies so many generations in, there’s a long-established official origin narrative some of their citizens are starting to question’ category I have a lot of time for. It’s so interesting how these three authors alone have come up with completely different ways of storing and uncovering the records that belie the myths their characters have been fed.

The Driftborn is all go throughout: Kade and co. are constantly having to fly away from or towards various people and things, get things working, or hide/obfuscate things, all under time pressure. This makes for a story that’s full of suspense, though I do feel like some intermissions/flashbacks might have given me a bit of space to pause, take stock, and maybe get a fuller idea of the characters and their world. While funny at first, their habits of repeating the same snappy, glass-half-full-but-barely catchphrases to one another wore on me a bit after a while, but then again, I’m not sure where they’d have found time for deeper, more revealing conversations.

For a cobbled-together little mech who speaks mostly in clicks, chirps, and bleeps (faithfully translated for the other characters’ benefit by Lira), Nix has a lot of personality, and was the star of the show for me. I also had a soft spot for Pella, an 11-year-old girl living in the Ashen Orchard who’s wise beyond her years without tipping over into brattishness.

The Driftborn is an imaginative and suspenseful space opera.