Ghosts Aboard Starlight

by Gume Laurel III

200 pages, Library Binding

Published February 16, 2026

About the author

Gume Laurel III is a Texan, native to the Rio Grande Valley on the southernmost border. For the past decade, he has dedicated himself to crafting literary works that promote inclusion and showcase diverse characters with intersectional identities. The bulk of Gume’s writings are focused on underrepresented groups, especially those from the communities he is a part of: Latine and queer.

When he isn’t writing, Gume can be found getting lost on a hiking trail with his dogs Blu and Mouse. For more info on what he’s up to, check out GumeLaurel.com and @TX.Author on Instagram.

Reviews

[Theediscerning · Rating 3 out of 5]

My second experience of this author, and one that suggests he can do straight sci-fi better than he can merge the teens-at-camp drama with fantasy. Here, the civilisation is reduced to what can fit within cryogenic-styled pods on a spaceship called 'Starlight', as it and they flee a kind of AI hell of a mining planet and seek new life elsewhere. While the journey takes all its many centuries, a different kind of artificial life exists, as the humans take part – in some kind of sub-"Matrix" fashion – in a different world. Our hero, who knows he likes being alone and always sought silence, has ended up with the experience of farming a small herd of triceratopses, of all things. But with his mother one of the programmers of this massive project, he's always going to want to seek phantoms of her around. But that ghost might not be alone…

This was my first experience of hard sci-fi in this novel-in-verse format, although as the audio version could probably fit on a CD it's a slight stretch to call it a novel. It's definitely sci-fi, though, with obvious "Passengers" feel, especially when it comes to being prepared to wake yourself up early, if such sacrifice is called for. How the podded people experience time differently also plays into this, and the whole glitch-in-the-machine evil of the ghosts that the characters fear. The author just about stays away from nonsense – I'm slightly generous in calling triceratops-farming something to think about as opposed to bunkum – and just about copes with the high drama action of later scenes.

I do still wonder if novels-in-verse are essential for genre writing. These are spartan lines – with multiple examples that are just two and three characters long. If this format is a boon to the reluctant reader, however, I'm all for it, but once more this author makes me doubt if his genre writing is perhaps as poetic as he thinks it is. That aside, this is an intriguing little diversion, and definitely three and a half stars.