RaveLitReactorWhat a wonder. The Wanderers is a meditation on space travel but also on how to be an astronaut. The author pulls the reader into the minds of these professionals so deftly that I felt like I was reading their autobiographies. If I ever wondered what it takes to do this work, I know now ... A final consideration in The Wanderers is the role and motivation of the corporation making it all possible. Prime operates like a Silicon Valley version of NASA, but it doesn't answer to Congress or the electorate; it answers only to its shareholders. Does that compromise in any way the future of space travel and exploration? Would a corporation behave differently than a government agency? For those of us who are enthusiastically watching Elon Musk and his SpaceX progress, perhaps we should ask ourselves this question and ponder the implications it has for the humans who climb inside his rockets and blast away.
Dan Vyleta
PositiveLit ReactorReaders will change their opinions about Smoke about a hundred times throughout this novel. It is mysterious and weird and has no clear analogue in the real world. The fact that it's still driving me crazy after finishing the novel tells me Dan Vyleta is a genius and I should read all of his other works. He succeeds in making the reader think about bigger concepts while telling a stay-up-late-into-the-night-reading type of story. There are some digressions that delve into the world of the working class that present a romanticized noble peasant, and the work would not have suffered had those been edited out...Either way, what a story.
