Douglas Addams fans rejoice! If you enjoy avant garde scifi satire, like Dr. Who, the original Star Wars movie, and the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, you’ll tumble down the rabbit hole into author Jenn Thorson’s world of misadventures and misfits. Life As We Know It is in danger. Only everyman Bertram, a grad student kidnapped en route to his PhD by an alien Indiana Jones and now bouncing like a human pinball through the Greater Communicating Universe, can save us. Help!
EXCERPT:
Bertram came-to lying at the bottom of a ramp, and any embarrassment at having fainted was nicely smoothed by terror, as the ramp rattled to life and grinded its way back inside the spacecraft.
He leapt to his feet, fear of abandonment tossing aside his nausea, prickling limbs, worries about breathable atmosphere and any other more practical concerns. Being abducted by aliens was bad enough. But being abducted and then dumped off on a planet that wasn’t even yours? He found himself waving his arms at the craft, a lumpy, graceless ship that bore more resemblance to a brachiosaurus in need of a diet than Earthen concepts of alien transport. “Wait! Wait!” he shrieked. “Don’t go!”
He sprinted to the slowly retracting ramp, getting a foot up onto it, then another, before the ramp slipped out from under him, burying itself into several thousand tons of metal. Leaping to his feet, Bertram pounded on the ship’s hull with bruising fervor, before realizing that all had gone silent. No rumble of rockets. No whine of turbine.
Bertram stood. He paused.
“We don’t have big skulls you know,” a voice said from behind him. And Bertram Ludlow turned, squinting up in the burning sunlight to see his extra-terrestrial kidnapper. Under the blazing suns, the stranger’s short, untamed hair looked precisely as full of white light as his clothes didn’t. And in a single spidery hand, he clutched some sort of remote control.
Bertram’s knees wobbled. “Uh…?”
“Big skulls,” repeated the alien conversationally. “We don’t have them. And very few of us are actually green. That,” he continued, “should be made abundantly clear.” He dropped the gadget into a pocket at his thigh.
“My God,” Bertram breathed. Because now it was clear. Now he understood that this was never about alien abduction. It was never about stun rays and parallel evolution, worm-holes and other too-slim probabilities. It was about only one thing…
Bertram Ludlow had cracked under the pressure of getting his Ph.D. It had been known to happen. He’d just expected to pick up on some warning signs first.
“It’s what you Tryflings are always flapping on about, aren’t you?” persisted the figment of Bertram’s imagination, wiping his brow. He patted his pockets and, after one trial-and-error, withdrew a pair of sophisticated-looking binoculars. “Aliens: the hairless little slaggards with big heads and eyes, dialing home and giving everyone enemas? I mean, you people, you’ve got the universe just dripping with rampaging acid-spitters, half-breed progeny, and lizard babies, don’t you?”
He peered through the binoculars, scanning the vast empty horizon. “In my experience, only one species bears lizard babies. And you wouldn’t want to call them that. Unless you were up for one fragging huge fight… Ah! Hello—there we are!” The man tucked the binoculars back in a pocket and motioned. “Come on, then.”
“Why? Where?” Bertram shielded his eyes. The rust-colored landscape was bone-dry, exhaustively rocky straight to the horizon and completely devoid of life. It didn’t even have a smell. There were no wafting blossoms, or the territorial musk of skulking beats. If there were a smell at all, it was the scent of hot. The only sounds? The crunch of gravel underfoot.
But his abductor just pointed to an area every bit as flat and rocky as the rest, differing only by the long, mysterious shadow that fell beyond it.
And as they approached, Bertram glimpsed two figures—rather big-skulled, he thought—until closer inspection proved them to be their own distorted reflections in the wall of a tower.
The tower was rendered virtually invisible by mirrored glass. Its walls were built on an outward angle, reflecting the earth below. And its roof was angled to catch the sky. From a different position now, the structure was almost blinding.
A tower. Bertram had expected more from his subconscious than such blatant Freudianism. An age-old symbol, representing any of a variety of control issues, he supposed, though none sprung to mind for him personally. At twenty-eight, single, and with his own key to the psych lab, Bertram Ludlow had all the freedom necessary for academic excellence. He’d wrap up the thesis this semester, defend and then, barring some unforeseen setback—like, say, a severe psychotic breakdown—graduate to a prime research position in the university of his choice.
There Goes the Galaxy grabbed me from the get-go, much in the same way Bertram was grabbed in his sock feet by Rollie. And unlike Bertram, who at one point is abandoned at an alien spaceport, author Jenn Thorson never released me, not even at the end of the book, when I was ready for the second course, the sequel The Purloined Number. The pacing is outstanding, with the two leads on the run and time running out, it’s mostly fast, but things like characters preparing in intriguing ways for the next scene still happen in the lulls, so there’s never a dull moment. Infopills between a few chapters give necessary background info in the style of Ben Bova, but more humorous..Plenty of celebrity references provide belly laughst in the course of this satire, much in the manner of Futurama and the Simpsons, only better! This book lasted me about a week, reading on breaks, at mealtimes and bedtime. I’ve now read it three times and probably will again. It’s action-packed fun, like a graphic novel, only it’s a word comic you can’t put down. For scifi lovers, it’s a gift that will never be forgotten!
Buy There Goes the Galaxy at Amazon.
DISCLOSURE: I bought my copy of this book on my own dime. I received no compensation whatsoever for this review. I just love the hell out of this book and I can’t shut up.
Belinda Y. Hughes is the author of Blues in the Night, Confessions of a Red Hot Veggie Lover 1 and 2 and Living Proof. Her next lesbian romance, a sequel to Blues in the Night featuring a disabled veteran U.S. Army nurse and a younger attorney, will be released Thursday, November 12, 2015, so watch this blog. Belinda enjoys classic rock and chocolate, candles and incense, bubble baths and beading.
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