I would like to thank Will from Gollancz for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher - Gollancz

Published - 17/3

Price - £16.99 hardback £9.99 Kindle eBook

Terraforming - the megascale-engineering of a planet's surface to one more Earth-like - is now commonplace across the Solar System, and Pluto's is set to be the most ambitious transformation yet. Four billion miles from the Sun and two hundred degrees below zero, what this worldlet needs is light and heat. Through captured asteroids and solar mirrors, humanity's finest scientists and engineers are set to deliver them.

What nobody factored in was a saboteur - but who, and why?

From the start, terraformer Lucian is intrigued by nine-year-old Nou, silent since a horrifying incident that shook the base and upended her family into chaos. If he could reach her, perhaps he could understand what happened that day - and what she knows about the secrets of Pluto.

Nou possesses unspoken knowledge that could put a stop to the terraforming. Gripped by her fears, unable to trust her family, there is no one she can talk to. Only through Lucian's gentle friendship will she start to rediscover her voice - and what she has to say could transform our understanding of the Universe.

Science fiction can sometimes be accused of lacking heart. Too obsessed with cold equations and hard physics and forgetting the human dimension. I don’t think that true though. The best stories need that emtional connection to humanity. This is true in real life as well as in stories. The International Space Station is a true wonder of our age but an astronaut singing a David Bowie song adds that little bit of human magic - we built it and then we got to play in space. Pluto was for many years a planet, got demoted and for so often just that outer ring in a text book until one day the New Horizons probe shows us it in glorious colour and reveals a red heart shape and the world clicked with that Little Rock once again. Ultimately we see seek wonder in the universe and reading Lucy Kissick’s impressive novel Plutoshine I got to imagine what it would be like to see a whole new world for the first time and see how far humanity might get and even surpass.

In the future the solar system is increasingly getting colonised. There are cities on Mars and Mercury; various other settlements and even nature reserves on the gas giants where bacterial life was finally found. On the outer rim though the great Clavius Harbour founded a settlement on that far distant world of Pluto and over the years a huge terraforming project has been slowly and patirently set up. Now a group of terraformers including young Lucian are to arrive and with an ambitious space mirror project are going to bring the sun to Pluto to start the long process of making it habitable for life. But the team discover Clavius is in a coma; his daughter is mute and it appears someone does not want the project to finish or perhaps even something…

What jumped out to me reading Plutoshine was it actually makes the reader see and feel the wonder of being on Pluto. Kessick delivers a tale where we get seas of nitrogen ice; a permanent twilight sky; strange mountains and the way Kessick used colour and description paints a brilliant picture of being on another world. So often in SF we just get action on another planet but here I actually did feel a little awe as our settlers cross the planet on journeys and all doing it in a very low gravity world. Kessick creates for the feeing of being able to cruise deserts at high speed just by effectively jumping and skating or where 400 meter mountains to jump over are not an obstacle…

But what I liked in particular about this tale was that we also get to experience life as a settler and yes there will be science (more on that in a moment gentle reader) but there is also people having lives. As well as science and settling we see billions of kilometres away a world where there is a small garden; swimming pool; kids in school; live music and most importantly cake and biscuits. Hard SF fans may struggle with this but personally I suspect the humans of the future will always need their Lemmon Drizzle cake and watching people laugh, joke and try to fall in love is just a reminder getting out into space shouldn’t mean we give up on being human.

The terraforming plot I think is really well handled. I’m sure lots of SF fans know what terraforming means but exactly how many of us know how would you do it? Very gently through Lucian and the young Nou forming a relationship we get someone explaining concepts simply at a level that I certainly could understand for a change. Then get to see the science in action - a mirror made of a huge moon; capturing asteroids in space; changing the atmosphere and more. We watch the terraforming start and if we get wonder and awe at an alien world we also get to see what Humans are capable of too delivering the same result. Lucian ensures we know this is dangerous work as on various planets it’s gone wrong as he eloquently put it - ants and a magnifying glass so we know if it goes wrong it really will….

Alongside this we also have debates on the nature of life outside Earth. Which we find out at a bacterial level is already found. But could there be more and does terraforming pose a risk to it? Kessick keeps us guessing what Pluto May or may not contain and how this relates to Nou and what happens to her father. But I was impressed how Kessick makes us think how life from elsewhere could evolve and should humans try to change a world.

In terms of plot the terraforming does not go simply (shocked I know) and here Kessick demonstrates when they need to do action scenes in space; racing across a planet or last ditch attempts trying to save people they can write really effective and fast scenes nicely counterbalancing the more domestic scenes. But for me what grabbed me and made me really appreciate how Kessick plays with the old classic SF frontier stories was we get some very human characters to latch onto. With Lucian as an outsider we get someone who is very smart and sociable and geeky; yet also someone fundamentally kind. Nou reminds him of his deaf stepsister and he very much wants to help her relearn communication and actually make her happy. She becomes a young Terraformer’s Apprentice building confidence and also for us helping us work out what exactly has been going on. It’s a really good quasi-brother and sister relationship that develops and gives the story a huge amount of heart. The discussion of sign language and how a child overcomes get psychological trauma was also for me very well handled.

Interestingly in contrast we get Nou’s older brother Edmund - a colder, less emotional scientist who has issues with both Nou and Lucian. This plotline develops in unusual ways yet I approve heartily in a tale of far off worlds and terraforming also having room for people learning to be kind and communicate far out in space.

I think Plutoshine is a hugely impressive novel taking the old SF exploration story and giving it an emotional depth in terms of natural awe but also showing us the humanity of the characters that makes it really a more fresher piece of SF. Those who enjoy our more recent trend to give stories that emotional depth should come walking this way fast. I suspect old school SF fans will lament the lack of hard physics and also be puzzled at the coziness of people having live music nights and biscuits out in space. Personally I am very much in the latter camp and found this far better than those SF novels that read more like geology instructions. I highly recommend this book and will be very interested to see read what Kessick writes in the future. One to watch!