The Salvage Crew by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

I would like to thank the author for a copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher – Aethon Books

Published – Out Now

Price – £19.99 hardback £2.99 Kindle eBook and £28.08 audiobook (narrated by Nathan Fillion)

An AI overseer and a human crew arrive on a distant planet to salvage an ancient UN starship. The overseer is unhappy. The crew, well, they're certainly no A-team. Not even a C-team on the best of days.

And worse? Urmahon Beta, the planet, is at the ass-end of nowhere. Everybody expects this to be a long, ugly, and thankless job.

Then it all goes disastrously wrong. What they thought was an uninhabited backwater turns out to be anything but empty. Megafauna roam the land, a rival crew with some terrifyingly high-powered gear haunts the dig site, and a secret that will change humanity forever is waiting in the darkness.

Stuck on this unmapped, hostile planet, lacking resources, and with tech built by the cheapest bidder, the salvage crew must engineer their way to payday...and beat Urmahon Beta before it kills them all.

The concept of artificial life has been around a very long time. We are at the hundred-year mark of the development of the word ‘robot’ but look further back and from golems to magical automata that pay chess we have been long been fascinated by something that resembles us but isn’t. In Science Fiction this genre now looks forward taking us into exploring AI, downloaded intelligence and that infamous singularity. Yudhanjaya Wijeratne provides a fascinating action-packed tale that also at the same time explores the concept of when does a human mind become something else with an unforgettable lead character that takes these tales into the 21st century.

A UN starship has accidentally crashed on a planet that was due to be terraformed. It has both materials and a crew to use again so deemed valuable and a salvage crew is despatched to recover it. Three humans and their AI Overseer (OC for short) are despatched via a low-grade sentient ship to retrieve and then they can get paid. All fairly new to their roles but it quickly becomes apparent a) this planet is filled with dangerous lifeforms, b) some deadly rival mercenaries are here as well and c) they’re on their own. This mission situation gets steadily worse and OC finds that they need to constantly find ways to protect their human crew from these external threats and sometimes internal ones. OC would much rather be writing poetry but is about to find the universe is a lot more complex than they realised.

This novel is brilliantly delivered. Initially fizzing with OC and the crew having just arrived on a new planet and you can sense things will not go smoothly. We also very quickly get to realise that this is not a kind universe. The human crew includes Simon who was used as a star in a virtual reality world, Anna whose biography doesn’t really add up and Milo an engineer who seems to have an issue with women telling him what to do. To glue this group together we get OC who for me is the star attraction. OC isn’t your regular company-built AI they were actually a human being who after many years working for corporations on various space missions decided to try for immortality as a augmented intelligence. This makes OC a curious mix of weary human, office manager, wannabee poet/explorer and someone starting to realise that they now see humans more as something else and not what they themselves were once part of. OC is friendly, kind-hearted but also not an expert yet in salvage missions, so that when things go wrong they’re very much thinking on their metaphorical feet balancing a mission with a more compulsive desire to save their crew from external threats and internal pressures. This makes them feel vulnerable in a way I’m unused to thinking about when it comes to AI.

As the vast majority of the tale is told from OC’s perspective, I was really impressed how Wijeratne made the character come alive. An unusual mix of human and something new. Imagine a happier but very stressed version of Murderbot but combined with the can-do attitude of the Martian. What gets interesting as the plot develops is that OC is not always now understanding human motives and gets surprised by someone of the irrational things humans do when they don’t like each other. OC isn’t always either babysitting as they make one crew member be a guinea pig for food made from an alien creature. There is an underlying exploration of what is an AI in this story that gets very important as the story develops which is fascinating and OC really makes that debate work.

The world of Urmahon Beta manages to be both setting and plot. Initially it just feels inhospitable but watching the crew make their base; learn to farm and also deal with the less than friendly weather and fauna this helps us invest ourselves in this crew’s health and their mission. This is not Starfleet it’s a corporate mission using these humans because they’re expendable and as OC mentions they’re not the best of the best it was who is available at short notice hence there are daft decisions, fights and rivalries in this crew set-up. The last thing they need is a rival set of Mercenaries on an increasingly strange planet. This leads to the discovery of a rival crew from a group known as Mercers - more human augmented with technology and very often prone to shoot first. With this discovery and the obstacles put in place rh initial drive and optimism of the team fades and we enter a much harder struggle for survival that has a cost for everyone. It’s a powerful middle act as we know this team is neither strong nor experienced so the odds are not great for a victory. It is an unsettling middle act rather than a rip roaring hi jinks adventure and all the better for it.

But dear reader what really impressed me was where the story goes next it goes into a turn that surprised and delighted me. I won’t tell you much, but this story goes into a section that ends up being more reminiscent of Iain M Banks than I was expecting and gives us an unusual and, in some ways, unsettling ending that also does that thing I often want in SF a sense of wonder. It is a brave left turn but looking back the seeds are planted throughout the novel and I felt it was an earned ending. Yes, I do like to tease you on occasion…but trust me it was worth the journey.

Wijeratne delivers a story that you may think you’ve initially seen before but delivers something more unusual, extremely well crafted and manages to honour science fiction’s past with giving us something new. If you enjoy Banks and Gareth L Powell, I think you’re going to really enjoy this novel a lot and I am certainly going to be looking out for more from Wijeratne in the future. Strongly recommended!