[Review] Endurance by Elaine Burns

[jajalala]

Title: Endurance
Author: Elaine Burns
Genre: Science fiction

What if you were stranded. On a spaceship. Four light years from Earth. With a hundred tourists. And you are the captain. Then things start to go wrong. Welcome aboard the Endurance. It’ll be the trip of a lifetime.

Full blurb here for those who like to read the blurb:

For five years, Captain Lyn Randall of the Endurance has ferried tourists around the solar system for Omara Tours. Now, as she takes in the rings of Saturn for the last time, she’s looking forward to indulging in simpler pleasures like flying antique airplanes over her childhood home in Montana.

The routine tour becomes anything but when a mysterious phenomenon flings Endurance and two other ships into the Rigil Kentaurus system, four light years from Earth. Stranded, with no way to get back.

Lyn’s first duty is to rescue survivors from the other ships before she faces the most daunting task of her life, much less her career. She has to control her fears and grief to lead an untested crew and panicked guests on a quest for a new home planet or risk a return to their solar system that could kill them all. Unfortunately, Lyn’s past with a clandestine military mission gone wrong doesn’t sit well with some guests and crew members, and they don’t quite trust her.

Diana Squires, rescued from another stranded vessel, grudgingly reveals her identity as the daughter of scientists who researched traversable wormholes. To complicate everything, Lyn develops an affection for Diana, something at odds with her responsibilities as captain and her unhealed grief over her own lost loved ones.

Feelings aside, suspicions aside, her own doubts about her ability to lead aside, Lyn has to fight to protect her passengers, her ship, and her heart.

If you like the sound of sci-fi disaster/survival scenarios focused on community-building, leadership, and hope, you may want to check this out

My main emotion while reading this novel was STRESS. Captain Lyn Randall of the spaceship Endurance ends up mysteriously flung through space into an isolated area light years away from any help, effectively trapped in a potentially life-long spaceship survival scenario with her crew and the group of tourists who were onboard. As they were a tourist spaceship intended to dock in a matter of months, they did NOT plan for this kind of long-term survival.

The tech
Luckily, it's the future, so there is tech that makes their survival feasible. However, the story effectively balances the boons and strengths of these new technologies that make a reader feel like "okay, this is how they can survive" while also imposing limitations and costs that keep the tension strong. For example, the ship runs on a Recyc-All system, which takes in mass and reformats the molecules into whatever you need. Super nifty and great in a closed loop system! However, there is inevitable loss in mass as time goes on, and so they have to find a way to harvest raw physical materials from planets they pass by... meaning risky missions trying to pilot tiny ships on and off of a planet surface. Additionally, the Recyc-All is a piece of technology... and sometimes technology fails. In other words, though there's all sorts of advanced technology (even beyond the Recyc-All which I used as an example), the stakes stay high.

The relationships/people
I adored Captain Lyn--she's upstanding, stoic, a bit awkward, but has a core strength that carries her crew and passengers through the harrowing journey. She is forced to make difficult decisions, and although she relies on others in fields she's less well-versed in, ultimately she is the person who has to grapple with and decide the direction they go... without causing mutiny.

One of the things I loved about this book was the focus on the overall community of the spaceship, and how important and valuable it was to consider it as a factor. Obviously the tech and resources sides are intense, but as this is a crew of PEOPLE they have a lot of people's problems... clashing personalities, distrust, but also people reaching out and supporting each other in unique ways. There was a large cast of characters, but I had a strong sense of most of them because they were all unique and adding something specific to the overall tapestry that was this spaceship community. Characters had traits that could be detriments or strengths, and one of Captain Lyn's abilities is to navigate and deploy their talents in a way that allows their strengths to shine.

That's not to say there isn't acknowledgement of how dark humanity can get when in this kind of scenario, but the Endurance is fortunate to have Lyn and most of their ship intact and the ability to spend some time keeping everyone on board happy and hopeful. Tensions grow as time passes and it's clear there is no rescue coming--crew and passengers disagree, distrust festers, and there are relationship/community crises that are just as nail-bitingly tense and high-stakes as the tech crises... but overall by the end it was a book that gave me a hopeful feeling about humanity and its ability to band together.

TL;DR
This book was a rich, delicious sci-fi crisis survival story that particularly focuses on the value of community and teamwork. Though the tech is advanced, strong tension is maintained--as soon as I felt like "Whew, things are stable!" there would be something new that threw things out of balance and required Captain Lyn to pivot and manage a new crisis. Basically, I had to churn through the last fourth of the book or so in one day because I was desperate to see what happened next. A page-turner with a hopeful center!