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944 Hidalgo: A Novel
Two female androids in love, an immigrant with a secret, an alien doctor, an astronaut on a mining ship, a man with hands of fire, a young woman with X-ray eyes, a grief-stricken robot, a Venetian executioner, a woman with foresight in a tower, and a delivery driver with a cargo of children all come together to save the planet from destruction when an asteroid plummets toward Earth, threatening to kill everyone. Roiling with themes of modern slavery and racism, as well as AI and the malaise of a modern world half asleep and blind to violence and destruction - not to mention a love affair, a father-son relationship, and android lesbian lovers - Jack Davies's thought-provoking, emotional storytelling is brought together in a shattering conclusion.
240 pages, Paperback
Published July 1, 2025
4 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 3, 2025
“944 Hidalgo” by Jack Davies is a genre-blurring, mind-bending journey through a near-future Britain, where catastrophe brews in the heavens and humanity finds itself fractured across borders, species, and old wounds. With poetic bravura, Davies launches his narrative from “Saturn is less dense than water” into a mosaic of love letters, dystopian landscapes, and desperate hope, all orbiting the looming threat of asteroid 944 Hidalgo. The book feels like equal parts science fiction prophecy and intimate confessional, with characters sending secrets and warnings across the cosmos, while wrestling with shame boxes, grief, and what it means to be fundamentally other.
What makes “944 Hidalgo” a standout is its confidence to entwine the cosmic with the deeply personal. Davies gives readers not only the apocalyptic spectacle of an asteroid on a collision course with Earth, but also mining stations around Saturn, dreams in lighthouses, and the jagged, raw voices of firemen, aliens, and engineered “Man-Mades” navigating the ruins of London and their own hearts. The structure crackles with energy: chapters flip perspectives, genres, and even narrative forms, yet the overarching mood is of yearning—for home, for connection, for redemption that always seems just out of reach.
Davies’s prose skips and sputters like a faulty pen in zero gravity: there’s wit and lyricism (“leaking refrigerator in the plum tree of blossom”) mixed with existential dread, pop culture references, fractured fairy tale, and flashes of mythic grandeur. The novel’s hybrid voice—at times rawly confessional, other times coolly observational, occasionally descending into riotous action or philosophical musing—creates a reading experience that is as immersive as it is unpredictable. The world feels deeply lived-in: post-pandemic paranoia, personal traumas, and failed revolutions burn beneath every encounter, and the threat of the end of days only amplifies the stakes.
Reading “944 Hidalgo” is like listening in on a cosmic radio, signals fading in and out from distant hearts and broken worlds. For those who appreciate speculative fiction that dares to be messily human—full of rage, tenderness, and blackly comic hope—this novel is a fever-dream transmission worth tuning in for. Davies’s vision is both harrowing and achingly beautiful, a reminder that when facing down extinction, all anyone really wants is to find their place in the universe, and maybe, just maybe, to hold someone’s hand as the sky burns.
What makes “944 Hidalgo” a standout is its confidence to entwine the cosmic with the deeply personal. Davies gives readers not only the apocalyptic spectacle of an asteroid on a collision course with Earth, but also mining stations around Saturn, dreams in lighthouses, and the jagged, raw voices of firemen, aliens, and engineered “Man-Mades” navigating the ruins of London and their own hearts. The structure crackles with energy: chapters flip perspectives, genres, and even narrative forms, yet the overarching mood is of yearning—for home, for connection, for redemption that always seems just out of reach.
Davies’s prose skips and sputters like a faulty pen in zero gravity: there’s wit and lyricism (“leaking refrigerator in the plum tree of blossom”) mixed with existential dread, pop culture references, fractured fairy tale, and flashes of mythic grandeur. The novel’s hybrid voice—at times rawly confessional, other times coolly observational, occasionally descending into riotous action or philosophical musing—creates a reading experience that is as immersive as it is unpredictable. The world feels deeply lived-in: post-pandemic paranoia, personal traumas, and failed revolutions burn beneath every encounter, and the threat of the end of days only amplifies the stakes.
Reading “944 Hidalgo” is like listening in on a cosmic radio, signals fading in and out from distant hearts and broken worlds. For those who appreciate speculative fiction that dares to be messily human—full of rage, tenderness, and blackly comic hope—this novel is a fever-dream transmission worth tuning in for. Davies’s vision is both harrowing and achingly beautiful, a reminder that when facing down extinction, all anyone really wants is to find their place in the universe, and maybe, just maybe, to hold someone’s hand as the sky burns.
August 12, 2025
💥 What if love letters from Saturn carried the end of the world?
“Saturn is less dense than water… and still, love drowns.”
From the very first page, 944 Hidalgo pulls you into a collision course between the intimate and the infinite.
Ingrid Bester, alone on a mining station orbiting Saturn, writes letters to John a London fireman with literal fire for hands. Her job? Admin. Her mind? A map of myth, loss, and cosmic longing. Her secret? She’s just witnessed a mining accident that split asteroid 944 Hidalgo in two… and one half is now aimed at Earth.
“You have such good qualities… but when the world comes around, we are always pointed in a different direction.”
Back on Earth, John navigates a plague-ravaged London, political borders, alien persecution — and his own destructive gift. When Alice appears, a green-skinned alien-heritage rebel who can “see the fire inside” him, their uneasy alliance kicks off a dangerous mission: find the boy who can save the planet, and reach the woman in the lighthouse who haunts John’s dreams.
This is no ordinary sci-fi. Davies writes apocalypse like poetry:
✨ “I store my shame, word by word.”
✨ “Life and death were in equal balance and the fate of the world lay in small twists of fate.”
✨ “To burn down all the libraries of the world… to have only one thought, or no thought.”
It’s a mythic road trip through plague ruins and sea-swept lighthouses, a love story coded in astrophysics, and a meditation on what it means to hold power you never asked for.
🔥 The beauty? You’ll come for the asteroid, you’ll stay for the people.
🪐 The danger? You’ll start to believe this could really happen.
❓ If the sky was falling, would you run to the hills, or take a one-way ticket to the stars with the one who broke your heart?
“Saturn is less dense than water… and still, love drowns.”
From the very first page, 944 Hidalgo pulls you into a collision course between the intimate and the infinite.
Ingrid Bester, alone on a mining station orbiting Saturn, writes letters to John a London fireman with literal fire for hands. Her job? Admin. Her mind? A map of myth, loss, and cosmic longing. Her secret? She’s just witnessed a mining accident that split asteroid 944 Hidalgo in two… and one half is now aimed at Earth.
“You have such good qualities… but when the world comes around, we are always pointed in a different direction.”
Back on Earth, John navigates a plague-ravaged London, political borders, alien persecution — and his own destructive gift. When Alice appears, a green-skinned alien-heritage rebel who can “see the fire inside” him, their uneasy alliance kicks off a dangerous mission: find the boy who can save the planet, and reach the woman in the lighthouse who haunts John’s dreams.
This is no ordinary sci-fi. Davies writes apocalypse like poetry:
✨ “I store my shame, word by word.”
✨ “Life and death were in equal balance and the fate of the world lay in small twists of fate.”
✨ “To burn down all the libraries of the world… to have only one thought, or no thought.”
It’s a mythic road trip through plague ruins and sea-swept lighthouses, a love story coded in astrophysics, and a meditation on what it means to hold power you never asked for.
🔥 The beauty? You’ll come for the asteroid, you’ll stay for the people.
🪐 The danger? You’ll start to believe this could really happen.
❓ If the sky was falling, would you run to the hills, or take a one-way ticket to the stars with the one who broke your heart?
June 23, 2025
Yorgos Lanthimos by way of Neil Breen.
I'm unclear...about a lot of things. I suspect this may be a debut novel. It sort of feels like Davies had ideas for like eight or ten short stories, novellas, and/or novels, but thought, "maybe I'll never get another chance," so tried to cram them all into these 224 pages.
Characters and plotlines tumble over each other, leaving this reader completely baffled at almost every turn. Viewpoint changes from one paragraph to the next. Characters drift in and out. An oncoming asteroid apocalypse is introduced in the opening chapter and then only mentioned like two or three more times in the whole book. There's at least one chapter that feels like it was an unrelated short story.
And the whole thing is in desperate need of an editor. Sentence structure, incorrect word use, awkward dialog, the before mentioned narrative perspective changes, and a general lack of clarity.
From my own ongoing experience, I know that writing a novel is a profound struggle. My hat is off to Jack Davies for finishing a novel. But I can not recommend it.
I'm unclear...about a lot of things. I suspect this may be a debut novel. It sort of feels like Davies had ideas for like eight or ten short stories, novellas, and/or novels, but thought, "maybe I'll never get another chance," so tried to cram them all into these 224 pages.
Characters and plotlines tumble over each other, leaving this reader completely baffled at almost every turn. Viewpoint changes from one paragraph to the next. Characters drift in and out. An oncoming asteroid apocalypse is introduced in the opening chapter and then only mentioned like two or three more times in the whole book. There's at least one chapter that feels like it was an unrelated short story.
And the whole thing is in desperate need of an editor. Sentence structure, incorrect word use, awkward dialog, the before mentioned narrative perspective changes, and a general lack of clarity.
From my own ongoing experience, I know that writing a novel is a profound struggle. My hat is off to Jack Davies for finishing a novel. But I can not recommend it.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews